(GLITCHTALE) Number All my Bones: There and Back and There Again
by Nazareth Rose
Summary: A story in memoir style from the point of view of the Dr. Gaster of Glitchtale entailing the events in between "My Sunshine" and what will happen in the next episode.
1. Chapter 1

"If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not have lived in vain."  
-Emily Dickinson

The way I've heard it, most authors start their books from an idea, something that inspires them, a concept. But the way I began this wasn't quite what even I expected it to be.  
My name is Dr. William Douglas Gaster. When I was five, I used a microscope to analyze that the particles floating around in my family's yard may have belonged to my grandfather. When I was in high school, in terms of scientific merit, I was compared to some of the former Royal Scientists, and while I was in college working towards my doctorate that led to that shiny addition before "William", that became an expectation.  
But I'm not a writer.  
I've been involved in countless scientific demonstrations, transformed one compound into another using a form of reaction that even the Underground's college fails to cover, and have been to an award ceremony once every month.  
But I'm not a writer.  
If I were a writer… well, I'd be in a very different place. I wouldn't be in nearly as many scholarships. I'd probably spend much more time wondering about how general the world is instead of how specific it is.  
More than anything, I probably wouldn't have enough money to settle down, and not nearly enough money to take the name of "Dad".  
Papyrus, my younger son, my only son, came to me a few days after Christmas, bored from school, noticing I was even more bored. That was more to do with the holidays being over and all, but my son thinks a different way. A way that doesn't buy grades for him in school, but gives him a different kind of intelligence. I appreciate that.  
He poured a hot cup of coffee for me, black with two creams like he'd memorized from the very first time he was allowed to use the coffee machine, and the conversation afterwards looked something like this:  
"Hey, Dad?"  
"Yes, son?"  
"You ever think of writing a book?"  
A few chuckles. "And why would I do that? I'm a scientist."  
"But Dad, why don't you write about… what happened?"  
What happened. What happened.  
I coughed on the coffee a little, and it burned down my throat like an unforgiving chemical burn as it went down. Coffee splattered all over my work clothes.  
Papyrus, of course, went all arms-flying, asked me if I was alright. And after a lot of fuss and chaos involving a few forceful tries of the Heimlich maneuver and an eventual glass of water, I said I was fine and that I just needed to change my shirt. He nodded his head and said it was fine, and I ran up to my bedroom.  
I ran towards the mirror, trying to compose myself. What happened. What happened. What happened.  
Was I ready? Could I put this down into words? How could I ever? I knew I couldn't. God, I was a mess. My eyes were swimming, I was shaking, I couldn't think straight, which I never, ever, wanted to do…  
I saw something.  
It was in the corner of the house, and it was a coffee mug, all misshapen after being shattered and put back together, almost shattered once again. I thought I threw it away years ago, but here it was, gathering dust in the corner. I picked it up, and the dust came in sluffs off of the coffee mug, and my eyes began stinging as if that chemical burn had spread it to my eyes. He'd given this to me. He'd given this to me.  
This story punched me in the same way the mug did. It was sitting in the corner, just waiting to be talked about, written about. It was gathering dust, stinging my eyes with tears, and just as he'd given that coffee mug to me, he'd given that story to me. He'd given so many lessons to me, lessons that would make me much worse of a scientist, much worse of a father, much worse of a man if he hadn't told it to me. He'd given me lessons that brought me out of my room and into the world, out of my tears and further into the world.  
And in the beginning, I supposed I paid him back. I'd told it to a few- no- dozens of people, each web unfurling with every section. What if I were to suffer a heart attack and were to collapse on the floor, and the story were to die with me? They'd all be sorely disappointed. I couldn't do that. Not to him, not to them, not to anyone on the world.  
I was ready.  
Or at least as ready as I'll ever be.


	2. Chapter 2

part one: there


	3. Chapter 3

"DaaaAAAd!"  
Once upon a time, when Papyrus went his own amazing way into elementary school, there was another little boy who was already in the third grade. This little boy's name was Sans, and he was Papyrus' brother. I loved him. I loved them both. I loved them both in different ways, but it was the same love.  
But just as this little boy went home from school that day, he started doubling over in what would be the worst pain in his life or mine. There wasn't anything he could escape from or ignore… the pain had latched onto his skeletal system, started to send his little ribs into spasms. He practically was the pain.  
Of course, I knew better than to go to the pediatrician, although that would come later. This was just for the diagnosis. I had much more qualifications than they did, even though a trip to the pharmacist for some sort of prescription would be probable. I raced the whole of us to the lab, which was just a few miles away at the time, and I prepared myself for the procedures. I knew exactly which tools to produce for a biopsy, which antibiotics to ask for when the time came. I gave him some Advil, and the three of us sprinted to the lab. Since everything was compressed to less than a mile or so, having anything faster than running wasn't our forte at all.  
I can remember just how fast everything blurred on by, even when I was carrying about ten pounds. First, snow blurred, then rain. We sprinted into the Waterfall. Sprinted into the core. When a sharp turn came, I could feel his hand digging into my coat. I looked back at him and he told me he was alright, but I could see the way his eyes crinkled just a little, just a little, and I didn't know how fast I'd ran until Papyrus tugged at my other hand.  
"Daddy?" Only five years old and already able to run without stumbling.  
"Yeah, bud?"  
My voice didn't shake, but his running became a little irregular, and I knew he'd found out. My son's pain and mine were on the same tether, the same beam. Only his was in his bones, and mine was… somewhere else, somewhere that logic doesn't like to address.  
"When are we gonna get there?"  
"Almost there, son. Almost there."  
As soon as I made the diagnosis- osteomyelitis- we all made our own way, hurrying and scurrying to the hospital. The lab was just behind us, all dark. We went right around that turn, and Sans turned his head away, his eyes wet when he turned it back. Once we went in the hospital, I started my speech on how his bones were infected and the doctors had to give him antibiotics before it got any worse, but I was quickly shooed away. Before long, I found myself in the hospital seat, all of this pain tearing away at me, knowing there wasn't anything I could do. And that was a worse pain than what he was going through.  
Nearly ten years later, I found myself in the same position, almost motionless on the floor. I couldn't bring myself to see him again, and not one scientific principle, not one comforting fact, would bring me back up.  
But Papyrus came running from the corner, and even though it was one of the most difficult things he could have done, he held out a hand and practically hoisted me up from the floor. He was tapping my shoulder, and things that were almost words, all stuttered out, came from him. I tried asking him what was wrong, but I could see the tears, and I knew that I needed to find out myself.  
Something… felt different. As a scientist, I'm not supposed to say I can feel these sorts of things. It goes against logic. But it was as if my cerebrum was all discombobulated, each and every sound pouring in a different way, an eerie way. The heat pumping out of the furnace was a little colder than usual. The family pictures on the wall hung a little more crooked than usual. And there was a taste in the air that comes whenever I'm out of the house for longer than a few hours.  
It was only a few hours later that I learned death had been the one to do it.  
But not yet. Not yet.  
"DaaaAAAAd!"  
It had come from that room in the back where I'd put him, surrounded by countless IV tubes and tools for medical procedures I knew wouldn't do anything but confirm what I already knew.  
Sans.  
My legs lurched forward, but everything else in me stopped. The air hung in the air, all dark and complete.  
He'd woken up.  
All I wanted for him was to go in peace.  
I stepped inside the room, and I didn't know I was shaking until I stepped in the door.  
All I wanted for him was to not be in pain. Is that too much to ask? Isn't it?  
I could tell he was in more pain than I've ever been in before I even went close to him. His eyes were all blue, and the same eyes that had the type of wonder to leave even me transfixed were in pain now. His little fists were scrunched-up, grabbing the sheets like they were the only thing that would save him. His feet were kicking against the glass in the bed, and-  
I couldn't look.  
But he looked at me, and I knew… I knew… that this right here, right in my home, right in his bedroom, right now, right in the middle of autumn, was going to be the hardest thing I'd ever had to do.  
I was going to teach him how to die.  
But the funniest thing was that I didn't know how. As a scientist, I knew a million ways to live, a hundred thousand ways to help another person live. I know how to root out which cells in the body are tumors. I know how to conduct a successful angioplasty surgery in order to save someone with a heart attack. I know which drugs help this organ system to function, which procedure will stretch out someone's life by another full year.  
I was going to teach him the one thing I didn't know.  
And I stepped in that room- Papyrus stepped in a few moments later- and closed the door.  
Hours and hours. Hours of pain. I won't go into it any farther. I can't. But by the time it was over, the sky turned black.  
Watching the light drain from his eyes is something I can't put down on paper. But there is something I can put down.  
"Dad. Dad. I'm so scared, Dad."  
"I know. I know."  
"Dad?"  
"Yes, son?"  
"Do you still have the scarf?"  
Papyrus snatched it off his neck, and it was only when it touched his brother's hand that he started to cry.  
He looked into his brother's eyes until they turned into marbles, glazed with water. He smiled, the way he always had.  
And he died shaking.


	4. Chapter 4

A month earlier, he was alright.  
We were all alright.  
Our house is right on the corner of a monster-only neighborhood, arranged by someone who would be one of my closest friends. But for now, she was hidden and tucked away. Our house is a pretty little thing, one that I don't think I could dream up in the underground. It has the same type of red etched onto it that you'd look at it and it'd remind you of faded ruby. It has a few windows in the front, and if you could climb up there, you'd see right into our rooms.  
You'd see mine, which is impeccable except for what could only be described as a hot mess sitting on my desk. But if you'd look inside my hot mess, you'd find a beautiful little mixture of classifications here, potential experiments there, and half of the desk covered in lesson plans to engage the thermal physics class at the university.  
Right to the left, you'd see Papyrus' room, which is redder than the walls of the house but having a happy little streak of orange all over the baseboards. Despite him being fifteen, you can see a fifty-dollar electric guitar hanging on one side of the wall and a hodgepodge of action figures on the other. His bed, like mine, is impeccable.  
To his left, you'd see Sans' less-than-impeccable room. You'd look in the door and find a trombone and a fifty-dollar telescope. There's almost always a pile of trash in the corner. But what you can't see is the ceiling, which looks like the Sistine Chapel of planetariums, all of the stars arranged in what would be the actual configuration in the sky.  
Our living room is nothing special, but it's what Papyrus ran into, sneakers a'blazin', and it's the place where I worked on the couch, coaxing a theory out of my brain about a new method of spectroscopy.  
"Dad! Dad!"  
"What is it? I'm almost finished with my work." I finished a few sentences, keen on finishing a few more sentences right after those, and I pressed so hard the graphite had bent slightly to the side by the time I was finished.  
"It's four o'clock! We need to go now, don't we?"  
If it was just Sans and I, he'd remind me, and he'd get ready while I lagged on about five minutes behind him. But this was Papyrus, and with Papyrus, when it was four o'clock, it was four o'clock. When Papyrus started shaking me just a little, just a little, I laughed and exclaimed a few "Alright, alright!"s before I headed my way to the car.  
We're not far from a city that they call Boston, and locals tend to boast about some of the scenic drives around there. But driving next to Mount Ebott is one of the most beautiful things I've gotten out of life here. It's filled with gentle hills here and there with Mount Ebott smiling down on them, knowing that she's bigger, taller, a mix of menacing and protective. The Japanese dogwoods and towering, spindly red oaks' shadows cover up the road, although it lets the sun come in the car at some points and turns the car into a spotty, almost epileptic flash of light and dark. Flowers poke out of the grounds and out of bushes, flowers that Sans has hated since he came up here, but Papyrus always seems to take a liking to. Lilacs that tend to attract mothers, tucking little flowerets into their babies' carriages. The pink rhododendrons that hurt Sans' eyes, that hurt mine, but still draw me in the more I try to look away. The roses, artificially planted but still there, still there, poking out and saying hello in every color, every language, each color a different one.  
This is where we live. Maybe it really would be a paradise in a different world.  
But a sharp turn to the right, and a honk from a human driver later, and we're at the elementary school, reaching so high that I can't see the sunlight. I went to the left, found a parking spot more towards the back, and I couldn't help but smile to myself knowing that I would get to spend time with Papyrus a little longer than usual. It was walks like that where I could look at his eyes, looking at his own type of wonder and delight.  
I smiled a toothless smile at Papyrus, letting him slam the door for me. He laughed in his contagious glee, almost snatching my keys before I could lock the door. I punched him playfully, and he laughed all the harder. Fatherhood allows me to be young again like that.  
I wish I could say that the schools here were just as palatial as the drive. But when we went here, we were introduced to the concept of these being places controlled by the government, which bristled with me, but didn't chafe with me quite yet. But this particular school gives me the willies, and each turn of a corner makes me wonder how children can stay here forty hours a week.  
The cameras.  
The cameras may be what's doing it. A quick glance on the side will reveal three little letters: "A", "M", and "D", three letters that almost elicit a punch to somewhere, if not the camera itself. Those three little letters stand for Anti-Monster Department, which is just as pleasant as it sounds. At first, I thought it was a scapegoat for everything we couldn't do, but further research proved that those were all lies, that it was the one who was really initiating it all.  
The monsters that can't participate in the same classes as humans can. Blame it on the AMD, I used to say. The AMD's causing it with its legislation, I say now.  
The monsters that walk home without an occupation when their human peers aren't quite as adept. Blame it on the AMD, I used to say. The AMD's causing it with its legislation, I say now.  
The monsters that come to the hospitals, battered here and there. Blame it on the AMD, I used to say.  
Blame it on the AMD, I say now.  
Papyrus tapped me on the shoulder, and I knew. He doesn't like me to dwell on anything this negative, and neither do I want to, deep down. So I turned away, looking back a little first, and then headed to the library. The signs said the library's supposed to be nice and quiet, but except on occasions where he's in his room, my oldest never really is quiet.  
Neither are the two around him, either. There's one to his left whose name is Chara, rolling his eyes and trying to get the whole of them to study. But on his right, there's someone new, someone I haven't ever seen before. Huh. Must be a new student.  
This is one of his tutoring sessions, and even when both he and I know he's fully capable of getting home on his own, it still brings a hefty smile to my face to see Papyrus' light up. And both Sans and I know that for a fact. I walk up to him, the mold from the forgotten school vents blowing into my face, while Papyrus starts shifting around the library, going off to the fiction section whereas I would be combing the science section. He tells another joke, no doubt on what they're studying… "guys, we gotta go back to studyin', otherwise, we'll be a lot more DENSE…".  
I tap his shoulder, and the corners of his smile retreat back to where they were, but the smile is still there. "Sorry. Gotta go back home." He tapped my shoulder right back. "Dadster here says I gotta go."  
"Awww!" says the kid to the right, and I try to look at her, but she reminds me of the times before I was steeped in work, so I look back at Sans, the floor, Sans again. "But we've just started-"  
Sans chuckles. "Kiddo, it's been an hour." He heaves off of the bean bag chair, and I walk over to Papyrus, steeped in some sort of mystery novel that's sucking him in so that his nose is just barely hovering off of the page.  
"Paps."  
Nothing.  
"Papyrus."  
Still nothing.  
It comes with the territory, the doctor said even after reviewing my qualifications. Kids on the spectrum tend not to reply, the doctor said. Touching them isn't a good idea, either, the doctor says. So getting his attention is about as hard as making flerovium, which is about as hard as herding a cat lady's entire colony.  
But after a few minutes- he tells me he finished the chapter- we all pile into the minivan, Sans still in tow, and head home. Papyrus pops in Led Zeppelin, played obsessively. But it's not because it's the type of music that he likes. It's the type of music I like, which is why he plays it over and over again.  
The recorders just start to set in in the first minute of the song when Sans, forever condemned to the back seat because of his height, starts to talk.  
"Dad?"  
"Yes, son?" I have to turn down the music, Papyrus almost protesting.  
"You know the new girl that I was tutoring today, right?"  
"Yes; continue."  
"She asked me somethin' even I can't answer. An' because you're a fancy-pants scientist with a fancy-pants degree, I thought you could."  
"Alright." I sat up taller in my seat.  
"She asked if.. well, I don't know how to… if… if scientists think it's okay to kill people in comas."  
What?  
I tried to pull over, but it ended up more as a swerve, and a black car that'd been riding our tail this whole time honked as it blew right by us. Papyrus shouted as we headed into the parking lane, the car jolting forward slightly. A month on the surface means that even now, I'm not very well acquainted with "driving" yet.  
"What did you say, son?!" My heart was still going faster than the car ever went.  
"Dad, I asked if comatose-"  
"Nono. I know what you said. It's just that-"  
Euthanization? Euthanization? I've never talked to them about this before. Besides, why would the girl sitting next to him… a girl only about ten years old… ask something like that? What happened to her? What could have possibly made her ask this? How could she possibly get an answer?  
I took a breath.  
How could I possibly give an answer?  
"Alright, son. Who is this girl who asked this? And why did she ask this? What happened with her? Do you know?"  
"Her name's Betty-she's been in the school for a month or two- and she knows a lot, and- Dad, I- Dad, please, I don't know, I-"  
Betty, huh?  
I take a breath. Another. Another. One question is all he can take. All I can take.  
"What was her SOUL color?"  
If she was purple, that may be able to explain it. Perseverance SOULs are much more inquisitive than the average SOUL, and were in fact the majority of the lineup of those who want to take the job I have at the university. If it were yellow, then that would explain it also. Justice SOULs are keen to achieve virtually whatever social goal they need, and if this "Betty" had a Justice SOUL, that may have explained it.  
But it was what he said that made everything go to shambles. That made everything crumble into bits, that started the fire that wouldn't stop, that never stops.  
"No, Dad. It's-"  
He has to take a breath, too. A deep one.  
"It's pink."


	5. Chapter 5

That's when the nightmare began.  
I can say that about fifty times throughout this whole story, but this is the first time. The second time would be the next morning, right after we all finished singing "Stairway to Heaven", our throats sore from laughter when we got home. I was going to spend the day going to Asgore's hearing- he'd been accused of murder, which I would have been shocked at if it weren't for the Anti-Monster Department's existence- and researching what exactly a pink SOUL meant. But life had other plans in mind.  
After a few hours, Betty came knocking on the door. She told me about how her mother and her were moving...again... and she would need a place to stay while her bed was being moved. After an hour-long talk with her and Sans, we laid out a blanket on the couch and let her sleep there. I fell asleep that night, thinking about how irresponsible her mother must be. Because of how frequently they moved, they were probably one of those families who didn't even bother paying rent. Didn't even bother paying rent! Didn't they have any relatives to send Betty to, or any closer friends? Betty had only met our family that day. I sighed, letting myself sink under the weight of sleep.  
The next morning, Betty was already awake and ready to go. After a few unsuccessful tries, I coaxed Sans out of bed for what would have to be the next step for the both of us… colleges. It wasn't enough for me to work at a college, exposed to students day after day, without me or my son ever being a part of them. There was no such thing as a "college" in the mountain… only experience and self-teaching.  
So a few hours later, Papyrus waking up even earlier than Betty, we were all eating our bacon and eggs and clicking like madmen at website after website, looking for the little icon in the corner that stood for "MF." If it wasn't there, then we could be.  
Using a few test correlations, we found out we were cut out for quite a few. Me, I was cut out for quite a few more than he was.  
MIT. There was the "MF" in the corner.  
Stanford. In the other corner, "MF".  
Harvard, "MF."  
I suppose Sans was hiding it better than I was, although he was clicking much faster than I was. I couldn't help but look over his shoulder, finding the same.  
University of Chicago. "MF."  
University of Pensylvania. "MF."  
He even tried looking at the college closest to us, the college that looked less on your smarts and more on your lack of money.  
"MF."  
I gripped my pencil so hard that it left my fingers aching after I let go, but Papyrus, taking a break from reading a mystery book he had snuck from the middle school, put his hand on my shoulder.  
"Don't worry, Dad. I'm sure you can find something. There are lots and lots of colleges!"  
I smiled to him, although it was all fake and wrinkled, but then I looked at the other computer and saw a mirror, reminded again where Sans had got that smile.  
I heard a knock on the door, satisfying the "shave- and- a- haircut- two- bits" rhythm, and as I moved out of my seat, Sans volunteered to get it, leaving me stranded with college websites, University of Chicago, University of Maryland, University of Thisandthat, all with "MF" in the corner. I expected him to come back after a few seconds, that maybe the person at the door was a salesman, but when the door opened and I heard a "yeah, come in, come in!", then I turned my head.  
Three kids, all undoubtedly part of Sans' tutoring program, but all of them knowing that it was really a playgroup in disguise. Betty was all smiles at Chara coming in first, then Asriel tiptoeing in. It was then that I remembered Asgore's call in the middle of the night… and the fact that I hadn't bothered to play the message on the answering machine.  
"Wait, wait, wait!" I exclaimed. Sans was smiling, but then it fell away completely, and without a word from me or him, all the kids grew quiet and shuffled to the brown sofas without a word, each of them taking up only a half a cushion.  
I sigh. How am I going to say this?  
I don't like to get exasperated often, even though every move from the AMD drove me closer and closer to that point every single day.  
"Look, Sans. You can't just bring the kiddos whenever you feel like it-"  
"But I told you, remember? They were going to learn about colleges. I told you last night."  
Last night. Last night was a huge fog, and I'm not sure if I'm out of it one hundred percent even now.  
I take another sigh. "Alright."  
Each of the kids on the half-cushions starts smiling, and Betty springs so quickly off of her seat that the entire living room almost shakes when she lands on the ground, and the migraine starts to explode.  
"But only for an hour."  
Their smiles are still there, just a tad faded at the edges, and they all bounce upstairs, Sans already there thanks to what he calls his "shortcuts", but what I call "a risk-taking medical anomaly that you should only use in time of dire emergency".  
I hear a creaking from the library upstairs, and I know they're settled in. I take a deep breath and get back to work.  
The mail comes a half an hour later, and thoughts spring up in my head I never knew I could think of so quickly. Are those college acceptance letters? I wonder who sent them. Stop it. You have to be logical here. You've just started searching for colleges, and all of them have had that stupid "MF" in the corner, as if the one who put it on there has started laughing at me.  
A gas often goes in a random, unpredictable set of directions, bouncing off of something, changing directions again. This is how my thoughts feel.  
And what about Betty? What about her SOUL? I haven't put any time devoted to this sort of research, and if our schedule continues to go this way, I won't be able to devote any sort of time to this, either.  
I step outside, and a black van is parked in the driveway with a woman holding a gun.


	6. Chapter 6

It's only a taser; I know. I know the basics about these types of guns, although violence isn't my main research preference. Still, I duck inside, my heartbeat still somewhat yelling at me, my head definitely yelling at me to get back to my work, that it's probably just some sort of census. But the doorbell rang, and Papyrus immediately sprang out of his seat, with that golly-gee smile impressioned all over his face, and sprinted towards the door. Sans sprinted after him, and I after Sans, all of us except Papyrus seeming to remember the rule that no one was supposed to answer the door except for me. But the door opened before I could say anything, and there stood the one woman I would cry over just a few weeks later.  
Her name tag read "Ica Rutrow, Head of the Anti-Monster Department", the "Jess" part obscured by a shadow for a little while, but I knew who she was. The streak of grey hair, the crossed arms, the badges on her blue dress told me everything. She was the one who had started the "MF" tag, the one who had started the monsters coming home without any sort of occupation, the one who had started the monster children not allowed to take the same classes as humans, the monsters being denied from the hospitals.  
The dehumanization process didn't need to be done; it simply was, and it was since when we were born.  
My smile stretches until it turns taut. "Hello, Miss."  
Her hand settles on her taser for a moment, but it stutters just before it settles by her side. "Hello, Doctor. I've heard a lot about you."  
I nodded. "I can say the same. Especially with your 'MF' endeavors. What does it stand for, though? I'll take a wild guess. 'Monsters Forbidden.'"  
She nodded back, although I could practically see her teeth gritting.  
Her hand moved closer to the gun.  
Betty whimpered a little, and Sans and Papyrus hushed the other children away before they could get embroiled in the grown-up soup of politics and science. In another world, maybe I would have gone with them. But that world is faraway, much too far from now to even think of existing.  
Miss Rutrow put her hand by her hip. "Are we conducting the meeting or not?"  
I nodded, although I didn't even think about giving her any more than that. I was prepared to send all of the children upstairs, thinking they went into the living room, but it was only Betty there, reading a history book for her tutoring program, no doubt. I was about to say something, but one look at the scary lady behind me all in blue sent her tiptoeing away and making her way up the stairs.  
As we sat on the couches, the coffee in the pot cold by now after my morning cup, I made my move, even though I knew it wouldn't work by a long shot. "Do you mind putting the gun away? I have four little kids here, and I don't want them getting-"  
She laughed, ran her long fingernails through her hair once or twice. "Of course not. You're the scientist, aren't you? You should know by now that it's only a safety precaution. Not that I'd willy-nilly fire at one of your kiddos, right?"  
I sighed, went into a conversation about geothermics I wouldn't give to my students until it was May and the graduation caps were being shipped. I counted myself using the words "entropy", "enthalpy," "quasistatic", "Carnot cycle", and "calorimetry" at least twice each before she started to nod off before nearly bumping her nose on the edge of the couch. Science that would have gone over her head even if she had a fifty-foot mitt to catch it. She jerked herself up so quickly that she started falling forwards, and I almost stretched out my hands to catch her before she could regain her composure."Well, Dr. Gaster, this was all very, very informative, but can you please focus on the effectiveness of your project?"  
I went into a slight smile. Finally. "Alright, Miss. The expansion of the Core will help to power our city by-"  
She put a hand over her mouth in mock shock, but I knew she was yawning underneath. A professor tends to notice these things easier. "So it basically makes our gas bills cheaper?"  
I laughed, and I almost put a hand over my own mouth. I shifted into a different language, one that politicians love to speak. "What-?! No. No, not at all. If the expansion is complete, you won't even have to pay for electricity at all. Ever. And thanks to it, we're starting to see a big change. Not only in the bills-" I stopped. I was getting a little preachy. I laughed again. Even if I was preachy, it wouldn't ever stop me from loving the feeling.  
So I gave in when she asked how the Core worked. Just this once.  
"Well, it converts geothermal energy from the mountain to-"  
I couldn't say "magical", but there was another word for that. A word I could use.  
"-idiopathic energy by using the underground chambers. These chambers have magnets with turbines that allow the electricity to be transformed from idiopathic to-"  
She put her hand over her eyes, although I know they were closed underneath.  
"It converts electricity to heat."  
"Oh, I see." Huh. So she wasn't asleep after all.  
"A non-polluting, unlimited, self-sustaining power source. Of course…"  
I stand up, and she puts her weight on her toes as if she'll follow, but she stays right there where she is. People say I'm a good judge, even though I'm a better scientist, but in cases such as this, I can't always pull out a clear verdict about someone.  
"...none of this would happen if you don't sign the agreement tomorrow."  
She nods, but puts her hand closer to her taser just in case.  
"Yes, but that doesn't mean anything."  
"What do you mean that doesn't mean anything? I've just explained an energy agenda that I doubt you'll find anywhere else, and-"  
"That still doesn't explain the rest of your kind."  
"Are you-?!"  
"Yes, Doctor. I am. You think that just because you've made energy out of the dirt means that you haven't come from it. You come up here and steal our jobs, steal our money, all because you think you're better than the rest of us. You-"  
I stretched out my hand, reach for anything looking vaguely like a door handle to push. "Miss Rutrow, I didn't say any of that-"  
"Oh, just because you didn't say it doesn't mean it isn't-"  
I saw her in the corner before I heard her. Betty had come back from upstairs, probably because of all the fuss we made down here, and was looking at me with some of the most terrified two eyes I've ever seen.  
"Excuse me, ma'am."  
She didn't bother me as I went over and patted Betty's shoulder. Poor girl. Only a few minutes here, and already we've escalated beyond what I would ever think of doing if Jessica wasn't… Jessica.  
"Betty, it's alright. The both of us were just having a discussion, alright? It's very important. So what I need for you to do is to go back upstairs and-"  
"Doctor."  
"Just a minute. What I need for you to do is go back upstairs and tell the others that everything is fine. And even if it does escalate, I'm stronger than I look, huh?" I patted her shoulder again for good measure.  
"Doctor, please. You're not talking to anyone."  
"Miss, what do you mean I'm not talking to anyone? Betty's right here, isn't she?"  
Chara and Asriel have come back down, too. I suppose the conversation died just enough. "Isn't she?"  
Chara shakes his head, while Asriel shrugs his shoulders. "She's still upstairs playing puzzles with Papyrus. An' I think she's learning how to play chess, too."  
I look to my right, and Betty's gone.  
Anxiety can do more than you could ever imagine, I suppose. If it can keep me staying awake at night after a dream that only mildly alarmed me, it can do what it just did.  
Anxiety also kept me heading towards my room after Jessica left, after calling down the kids and getting Papyrus to help me fix a pizza and some chicken, telling them that dinner was probably right around the corner.  
And just as anxiety foretold, something's wrong.  
One of my books on human-monster history has fallen on the floor, but even without any sort of education in physics, I can tell it doesn't fall like that. It's at least halfway across the room, my bookshelf still in place right next to the door, and when I picked it up, another eerie fact sent a chill down my spine, and I almost felt my coat shaking along with it.  
It was open only a few pages in towards the end. Experience has taught me otherwise. If books don't fall flat on the covers, front or backs, it normally falls with the middle pages open and spread out. Meaning if it didn't fall, someone had to have taken it. Was it Sans or Asriel or Betty or anyone being tutored by him, forgetting to pick it up after they'd left? Or was it Papyrus, who was trying to get his own little revenge for me not getting him the book at the library?  
Alright. Focus.  
It's probably one of them.  
I put back the book, and I sighed, going out to fix myself another cup of coffee.  
Anxiety can do everything, I suppose.


	7. Chapter 7

Anxiety can do everything, but I can still do something about it.  
I suppose.  
But even if I did do something about it, it was still the kids that made the first move. After dinner, Chara rushed up to me and jumped up and down, telling me over and over again that "Mettaton's out there, Mettaton's out there, Mettaton's out there!". I put one hand on each of his shoulders, trying to get his shuttle of excitement down from outer space, but in a few seconds, he kept on babbling about how "Mettaton's out there, you can check the website!", and to my surprise, he was out there.  
Hoping the Internet was right this time- the UnderNet tended to be a little more reliable- I went over to the other kids, who were all staring at me with this same "golly-gosh, he's really out there, can we go?" expression on their faces that only a child can make. Sans and Papyrus, them being a little grown, tried to make this same expression, but failed and just smiled instead.  
I said yes- the papers on my desk were growing to the point where they were rivalling Mt. Ebott- but I had to lay down a few ground rules first. No straying away from Sans and Papyrus, absolutely NO swearing at people just because they're hurling obscenities at you, and no spending money on anything beyond the thirty dollars I gave them, and Sans and Papyrus saluted to me at the same time before all of the children sprinted out of the house before I shut the door.  
Finally, a little quiet.  
In a few minutes, though, it turned eerie. Not as eerie as finding the history book on the ground, only a few pages towards the very end. But the eeriness that came was a type that I'd never want to go through again if I had the choice. Noises, sights were too clear now that the kids were out of the house. For the first time, I heard my computer making a constant buzzing sound that would only stop when I unplugged it. The thermostat outside went from its normal hum to a yell. Without any feet to drown it out, I noticed the poplar making a cracking noise that may have very well sounded like gunshots.  
I almost went on my phone to call Sans, to ask him to bring the kids back, but I knew that would be too stupid for someone like me. No. I needed to do something to distract myself, something to bring me away from the fact that no children in the house meant no way to center myself.  
I brought myself to the mountain of paperwork and began to comb through that, as I had nothing better to do. Asgore's calls were still coming through to the answering machine (the regulations against monsters tended to keep us dated in human technology), asking me how I was doing and that it's been such a long time and that I should call him back. But I still had nothing better to do. Jessica, before she left, slipped me a business card and said that we could have another meeting sometime, something less formal. But I still had nothing better to do.  
Nothing better to do.  
I kept on rummaging through my work until I saw the sunlight turn from yellow to the lightest shades of blue to as blue as my son's hoodie. The clock still ticked until my nerves rose up until I couldn't focus on my paperwork any longer, and I had to put on some classical music. But still, nothing changed. Not until the ticking poured in again, until the feeling that something was horribly wrong poured in again.  
There was a ring at the door.  
"Come in!" I announced, but since I didn't want to be left alone with my paperwork and the ticking clock and ticking floor and ticking furnace, I came to the door anyway. The knocking got louder, faster, and I was almost convinced it was a door-to-door salesman. At that moment, I didn't care whether it was a door-to-door salesman who had ignored the "NO SOLICITING" sign, right next to the "THINK LIKE A PROTON AND STAY POSITIVE" sign. So when I opened the door and I saw Chara, Asriel, and Sans, I opened the door faster than I would have for anyone else.  
I was so gullible. So gullible. I didn't notice just how worried they all looked, or how close Sans was to passing out, or the fact that Papyrus wasn't even there. For a scientist, I'm so gullible. So gullible.  
As I was streaming out my greetings, Chara waved a polite hello, but said nothing. Both Asriel and Betty looked down on the ground, as if my eyes would knock them right off of the front porch if I even tried to look at them. But Sans seemed to ignore me and instead bolted for the trashcan we keep in the living room.  
He made it about halfway before, bowing like a Broadway actor, he upchucked the pancakes he had that morning all over the poplar floor.


	8. Chapter 8

Other than a few reflex "ewwww"s, no one said anything. I helped him on the couch and put the reasserted pancakes into the trashcan before I even thought to close the door, and the room plummeted to about fifty-five degrees before Asriel, out of all of the kiddos, thought to close the door.  
"Alright," I said, dragging over the trashcan to the couch just in case. Their expressions started to take on more and more of a worrisome tone, and the fact that Papyrus wasn't there came into mind, although I made up an explanation having to do with Papyrus getting some spaghetti to bring home. "What happened? Was there a fair? Did Sans go on too many rides?"  
Everyone said some form of "no", at the same time, all of them overlapping each other.  
"Guys, guys!" Quiet came again.  
"Then what happened?"  
Everyone started overlapping. I heard something from Betty about her not knowing anything about what happened, something from Asriel about Jessica having to do with it, and something from Chara about Papyrus being kidnapped by Jessica, although my hearing wasn't the best. So I yelled the loudest, quickest "Hey!" I could mention, and the room got a little chill added back to it, although it was completely silent.  
"I'm sorry about that, but I did need to get your attention. One at a time. First Chara, then Betty, then Asriel."  
Chara takes a deep breath, and it's just then that I hear Sans snoring in the background. "Well, we were all going to see Mettaton, right? We went out on the street and were all having fun. Papyrus was going to the Italian restaurant owned by one of the monsters to get some spaghetti, Sans was going all goo-goo eyed over some telescopes in the outlet store, and everyone else was going up to Mettaton to get an autograph, and-"  
"Please get to the point. When did the trouble start?"  
Chara paused for a few seconds. "Alright. So I'd say the trouble started when we saw a girl stuck on top of the crane and not knowing how to get down. I would have done something about it, but by the time Asriel had tapped my shoulder and told me what was going on, Papyrus was already gone and going towards the crane."  
My heart caught itself up in my jacket threads.  
"We all watched the crane, Sans praying to himself that Papyrus wouldn't get hurt. Papyrus climbed into the place where you control the crane, and I thought he was going to push a button to let her down. But the crane was holding-"  
Asriel couldn't help but almost jump up. "It was holding all these metal bars! All these metal bars! And-"  
I put up a hand. "Please let Chara tell his story. I'll get to you soon."  
Asriel sank like an accordion slumping over.  
Chara fiddled with a loose thread in his sweater. "The crane was holding all these metal bars, and we thought Papyrus was just going to press a button to let the girl down. But I guess he pushed the wrong button or something, and the metal bars were coming down. We all started to run, but Sans caught them with his teleki- telkinet- telk- ah, forget it… and held the bars up in the air. So I called everyone and told them to get themselves out of there, and I saw phones recording him and everything. But still, just about everyone had gotten out of there in about thirty seconds before I saw Jessica standing in an alley. Something that looked like lightning came from her direction, like a taser or something, before it hit Sans. His teleki- you know what I mean- stopped, and everything dropped to the ground. No one was hurt, though.  
Sans started to topple over, and he just sat there until we got ready to go home. But I made sure everyone was alright before running to the crane with Asriel. Papyrus had run off into a nearby alley. He said he felt dizzy and that he was about to pass out, so we tried to help him. Then an officer came running around the corner and told us to move because Papyrus was under arrest for dropping the metal bars. We didn't have any choice but to hand him over, and-"  
I didn't pay attention for the next ten seconds or so. I couldn't. Arrested? Arrested? I could hear the blood pumping in my ears. Arrested? He couldn't be arrested. There wasn't anything about him that I could see that could cause them to be arrested. The whooshing in my ears built to a climax. This was all Jessica's fault. This was all Jessica's fault. This was all-  
"Dr. Gaster?"  
It was Betty. I couldn't do anything but nod.  
"Can I start my story?"  
I nodded again.  
"Alright. I don't think it was Jessica in the alleyway. How could you know for sure? Nobody was close enough to really know it was her. It may have just been some weirdo teenager with a blue dress! Anyway, she was probably much too busy at the office to go out and see someone like Mettaton. Also, I have no idea what you guys are talking about when it comes to the girl on the crane. Papyrus just might have been seeing things! He felt like passing out later, remember? And even that might have been the heat. Gosh, was I thirsty!" She laughed, asked to excuse herself and go to the kitchen. She came back, sat down in front of Sans, drank the water.  
Asriel sighed and went on his tiptoes, and he didn't stop being this agitated until I told him to tell the story. When I did, he stood up, reached out his hands as if he were a centrifuge with all of its tubes spread. "But I swear she was there! I swear! I swear she was! I was the closest one towards her, Betty. I could see her eyes. I mean, I could have even seen her badge. It was definitely her, Betty. It had to-"  
Asriel started breathing so fast, so dangerously fast that I knew it could only be one thing: panic. I could tell Chara was about to move, but he was far from having the parental instinct that I did. I patted him on the back, eased him into the level of calmness he was in before.  
I called Toriel and Asgore, telling them about what happened. While the two of them were eager to take Chara and Asriel home, they admitted that they were solving the mystery themselves. Betty's mother, she said was at work, and the number she gave me took me right to an answering machine. Essentially, we were all stuck at my house.  
We decided that the best thing to do was call everyone into action. Sans woke after awhile, feeling weak from the blast but "not weak enough to stop me from helpin' out", as he put it. I tried to coax some water down him, but he told me he was fine. I told him he needed to rest himself, but he told me again it was fine. I knew then that this was as much progress as I could make; any more "I'm fine"s and he would be trying to do cartwheels as a triumphant display of his "fine"ness.  
They went in a different order than I did- Asriel, Betty, Chara.  
Asriel went first. "I'm sorry."  
Chara raised an eyebrow. "Sorry about what?"  
Asriel looked down. "About me yelling earlier. I didn't get all of the facts, I guess. And I have to find a way to get them; that's just all there is to it. Weren't we all getting out a different story earlier?"  
A unanimous nod. I pull up a chair, move my way into the conversation.  
All it takes is me saying, "I understand," and everyone looks at me, gives me that same look Papyrus and Sans give me all the time when a task is just a little too big for them. They put on a type of admiration that puts enough demands on me to take control. It's that look that tells me I'm the adult here.  
"I do agree that we should get more information, and I think that we should get started with going back to Mettaton."  
Betty sat up in her seat. "Back? Why? Weren't we just there?"  
Sans smiled. "It's to get more information. He's a reporter along with his antics, and he should be able to get somethin' out of all of this, and-"  
Asriel darted his eyes to the left a little before looking back at Sans. "But it might not have the whole story, you know?"  
My mind can't help but smile a little at that. Children, especially, can surprise me in ways I don't even think about, even with my PhD.  
Betty stuck out her tongue to her upper lip, the same thing I used to do as a child whenever in deep thought (come to think about it, I wonder how many people saw me as a tongue-sticking-out zombie when I was a child). "In order to get what really happened, we need to actually see it."  
"But we were already there, didn't we? And it's not like we're ever going to be there again to see the missing parts, right?" Asriel's eyebrows furrowed, and still I sat, a million ideas floating in my head with one idea taking over all of them: let them apply themselves. Let them be children.  
Sans smiled, the way he always did. "Something already did see the missing parts."  
The cameras.  
Betty's eyes practically lit up, the same way the sunset lit up Sans' dark-blue room every morning, turning the room into a place of welcome, even the piles of garbage here and there becoming charming instead of a little lazy. "The cameras! Yeah, the cameras!" she chirped, her toes kicking against the floor, making a dull throb that almost shakes the nearby cabinet.  
I sat up in my seat, almost standing up. "No, you're not going there."  
Sans was about to say something, but Betty spoke first, a kind of wildness to her that almost came out to anger, a low, non-burning sort. "But it's our best chance, and who knows if we're going to get another chance-"  
"You're not going there today. At least not today. Not after what just happened."  
Betty bit her lip and sank back into her seat, and when she was asked if she had anything else to contribute, she only shook her head. It cycled around and went to Chara first.  
I'm not certain at what Chara said, but whatever he said gave Sans that look.  
I knew that look, and I've seen it, and whenever I see it, everything inside me tends to stop. I've seen it in Asgore just before he left. I've seen it in the eyes of millions, ready for battle, gripping their spears by their shaking sides. I've seen it in the eyes of-  
It's that look of death. That look that no matter what that person does, no matter what that person says, nothing will change.  
The person with that look will kill them.  
I couldn't sit. Sans was holding Chara up in the air, that look still on him, God, that look. I couldn't sit. I was flying, my jacket tugging on the chair and ripping on it, and a precariously small notecard I was holding in my pocket for one of my presentations slipped out on the floor. I couldn't sit. I was heading to the living room, pulling Chara away. I couldn't sit. I was watching Chara crying, tears slipping the same way my notebook slipped down to the floor earlier, and I knew I couldn't hold back anymore.  
I asked him what Chara said that made him like this.  
He looked at me.  
He put Chara down.  
He looked me in the eye.  
And he said that even if he told me, I wouldn't believe him.  
He turned to Chara.  
"You should've killed me. That would've hurt less than this."


	9. Chapter 9

I was going to punish Sans later for his outburst, but other than the look he had on his face, there wasn't anything that gave away that he was going to kill, or even hurt, anyone. To all the rest of us, it only looked like he was angry. Still, that didn't stop me from thinking of something- maybe a night without his telescope, maybe a week of him not being allowed to play the trombone- but as soon as he staggered onto the couch and asked for the bucket, I thought that was punishment enough.  
Even if he does have better judgement than I do on these sorts of things.  
But something bugs me about what he said, even though Chara won't tell me exactly what he said to get Sans so angry in the first place. What he said at the end plays in my head over and over again, like a song on repeat in a broken cellphone's music player.  
"You should have killed me. That would've hurt less than this."  
My shoulders slumping just a little, I let the children play together after something this disheartening. Thinking of researching what the piano a pink SOUL's characteristics even were, the thought of Papyrus freezing in his jail cell very quickly made its way to the top of my mind again. I made my way to the phone in front of my desk, the number for the local law enforcement draining out of my fingertips.  
The first phone number was the local law enforcement center's office, headed by… you guessed it… the HSO. Needless to say, when I called them, they told me they couldn't accept phone calls with "my specific code", and a few seconds of jumping around my thoughts told me that this meant any monster in the town, all of them closed inside our neighborhood. They apologized over and over again, and without another word, they hung up. The beeping from the phone in my ears practically drove me to the idea of running out of the backdoor and yelling 'till the birds flew away, but still I called.  
The second phone number was the actual prison itself. At first, it was from a very nice woman who introduced herself as Sophia, and our conversation went something like this:  
"Sophia, you wouldn't happen to have a way to contact any prisoners, would you?"  
"We do, but in some situations, and depending on who calls, they're sometimes… closed off."  
"I see." She couldn't see my teeth grit. "Is there any way we could at least obtain any trial dates?"  
"Well, sir, I'm very, very sorry about this, but again, this depends on who calls. We don't want anyone prone to being criminals finding out about other prisoners, but-"  
"Ma'am. Are you saying that-"  
"Sir, I'm so sorry. I know how great monsters have been, really. I was at the live broadcast, too, and it's much better than- God, much better than any of the shows I've seen lately. It's just that it's my first month here, and… jeez, I'm already going to get in so much trouble if I get caught doing this. And just the teeniest, tiniest infarction will get me so far down the road that-"  
I let myself relax, just a little. "It's alright. I understand. But could I at least get hold of another-"  
It was as if she heard me. In the background, I heard a few loud sentences, ending with "punk", and I knew she was there. Nobody could see my smile.  
"Hey, thanks for taking over, Sophie. And not hangin' up on 'im. We'll keep this whole thing quiet. Promise." A pause. "A'ight, G," Undyne starts. "Before you ask any questions, he's safe."  
Safe. The word rolled over me like the last gentle ripples of water that come just before the shoreline, and I let myself lean back in my seat. She must have heard me sigh.  
"I knew that'd cheer you up. God, it's awful what they did to 'im. Makes me hate working here sometimes, even if it does put food on the table. They interrogated 'im, too. Didn't beat him up or anything, but it sure did scare the smile right off of 'im. And what's the worst part is...he's uneasy. Really, really uneasy."  
"If I was interrogated, I'd be much more than uneasy. I'd be angry. I-" I laugh. It's the only thing I can do now besides crying. "I am angry. I… I'm so, so…"  
"Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. But this is…" She huffs. It's never good news when she huffs. The last time she did, it was the first time any of us had seen a car on the road. We were all judging what it was, and when she huffed and said that it was safe… well, let's just say I almost didn't get to write this book.  
"...G, this is really different. It's not like the regular uneasiness. He's all jittery, begging to be on the phone with you. He says that if he doesn't tell you, he'll explode. And that if he doesn't tell you, something… super, super, super bad is going to happen. I think-"  
"I think I should be on the phone with him, Undyne."  
I could tell she didn't hesitate because of the sound of her jail keys jingling, and I knew she broke into a run. This wasn't like Papyrus at all.  
He wasn't… the whole family isn't suspicious at all. I attempted to explain everything that happened with science and some sort of psychology. When Papyrus asked me why he dreamed the silliest things every night, I couldn't do anything but mutter something about his brain filing away random, silly bits of information. Sans asked me why Mr. Gosset the librarian has to have a substitute because he suffers from cancer, while the library assistant doesn't. I said at least three paragraphs about heredity.  
And when he asked how to stop it, stop it completely, I moved to a different subject.  
In about a minute or so, I heard Papyrus' voice, and the relief was enough to make me lie down on the second couch. "Hey, Paps."  
Sans sat up as if nothing was wrong with him, smiled, started reaching for the phone, flapping his hand back and forth. With a little vindiction, I pressed the speaker button.  
"Hello!" His voice shook a little, but neither of us said anything about it as we all shouted out our greetings. Sans migrated to the other couch.  
"Hey, bro! How've you been?"  
"Well, brother, it's been a little… distressing."  
"Yes, I heard," I butted in. "Undyne told me about it." Sans looks at me like I'm a three- headed alien.  
"Wait, whaddya mean 'distressing'?"  
Papyrus took a deep breath. "Since I've been here, I… I've felt uneasy. And it's not just because I'm here. It's an… all-of-the-time thing. Sometimes, I even forget I'm here, and I still feel uneasy. I just have a feeling you guys are going to do something while I'm gone, and do something horrible. I think-"  
"We'll be fine," I interrupted, and Sans looks at me like I'm a three-headed alien again. "Whatever we do, we'll be careful. We promise."  
"Well… alright…" Papyrus says. "But that still doesn't stop me from feeling uneasy about something. It's like you guys have just started doing something while I was gone, and if I don't tell you what I think about it, it'll go wrong…"  
The thought speeds into my head faster than I thought something could run. As a scientist, most of my thoughts, and all of my theories, seep into my head in a slow, forward march, about as slow as walking to somewhere that's an arduous trip even by car. But this one is a truck, hitting me faster than anything.  
It's the cameras.  
I tell him again how it'll be alright before giving the phone to Sans, and the both of them talk until the phone battery dies.  
It's the cameras.


	10. Chapter 10

Even a few minutes of me watching the news makes me want to turn off the TV. Another opinion editorial disguised as a PSA about how monsters have made no contributions since they've come. It's all Jessica. It's almost disgusting how stupid she is. And because she hasn't looked into the issue at all herself, how lazy she is.  
After an hour of me making dinner, hearing the children's feet bumping all over the place upstairs, the children rushed down, exhausted after play, but some of the younger ones still asking for just a few more minutes. They all ran downstairs, clomping and stomping their way, and after dinner, we all gathered in a circle in the living room. The sun slipped and fell over the horizon, and the dark coaxed a few ghost stories out of Chara and Betty.  
I set up the table in the middle to make it as professional as it could be for a group of children, my brain reviewing the three laws of thermodynamics again… some of the college students had already forgot.  
Betty was about to finish her scary story, taking me out of my scary adult world, ending with a gigantic, "And then, the monster attacked everyone in the city, taking over the world for REVENGE!". Chara and Asriel yelped a little, and then fell down, laughing, on the poplar floor about how they'd yelped. I sighed just a little… the scary adult world was still in full force… called them up to their seats, and after a few seconds of reluctance, Asriel was the first one to mention the cameras. Sans, now awake, quickly cut him off. Papyrus' warning still rang fresh in our minds, even though it still seemed just a little ridiculous. But there was something about it, something cutting, something deep, that terrified us just a little.  
Sans cleared his throat. "I still think it's a little silly. Even a little foolish. It's a big government organization, isn't it? We could get in trouble. Breaking an' entering an' all of that. Maybe we need to do this some other way. Or not make plans when I'm sleepin'."  
Betty shifted her weight from foot to foot, and Asriel laughed a little before speaking. "But I've still got a good feeling about this. We want to get Papyrus out of there, don't we? Dr. Gaster, what about you?"  
I looked to the right, and Chara was still looking down towards the ground, not saying a word. I cleared my throat towards him, but he didn't react.  
"Well, it may free Papyrus…" I started.  
I felt it coming, but it was more like something that would leap out of my throat rather than something I'd like to say right then and there. There was nothing stopping it, nothing my scientific brain could do. Once I barreled in one direction, I couldn't stop.  
"...and it may indict Jessica as well-"  
"What's 'indict'?" Asriel looked at me as if I had something stuck on my suit, something he was too polite to point out.  
Stupid Dr. Gaster. Now you have to explain yourself.  
I stuttered through it in a way my college students would surely make fun of to the ends of the earth. "Nevermind, n-nevermind. Well… 'indict' means to find something someone's guilty of, and then they can go to jail, and then, and then…"  
"Jail?" Sans tried to stand up as quick as he could, but tottered back down to the chair. "Isn't she part of the HSO? They can't send 'er to jail, can they?"  
I didn't want it to come spewing out of my mouth- that would end in disaster again- but the thoughts were still making their connections in my brain, building their own towers, their own cities. Yes, they can, I thought. If only we have the evidence, I thought.  
After we held onto that topic for a few minutes, they started talking about how and if they'll get home alright, what will happen if they're discovered, who will be the "getaway driver". I promised them that if anything happened, I'd be there to take them home as long as they called me first. Asriel nodded and tucked his cellphone in his pocket.  
I could see the nervousness and sweat building up on Betty's neck. Betty assured them that it was an out-of-the-way backroom, with nothing but them and the cameras in sight, and that there wouldn't even be a need for a getaway driver. No matter what arguments Sans or Chara tried to throw towards Betty, Betty's argument would always put them at ease. And after a few minutes, having all but given up with trying to impress each other, they asked me for the verdict. Their beady eyes went right into me, Asriel's with a sort of eagerness I haven't seen in either of my sons' eyes since they were children in the mountain.  
"You can go."  
Chara clung to his seat, looking down at the floor as if it were a vortex sucking him in. A few quick questions from me revealed that he was going to stay here, that he wasn't going to the cameras. Besides, he said, he didn't want to be part of a breaking-and-entering, even if it meant Papyrus was going to get justice. While a few parts of me lit up with anger, I did eventually see where he was coming from and let him stay. The rest of them started to clamor before I could get any other words out, abandoning the chairs, putting their jackets on and running towards the door. But before Betty could put on her jacket, she coughed a few times and told me that she had chills running through her.  
I would have put my hand against her forehead, but what if what Sans had been hit with was contagious? What if it was some sort of biotechnic warfare, something that hadn't even been looked into yet?  
I pause. What if this wasn't Jessica at all-  
Stupid, stupid, stupid Dr. Gaster. Paranoid Dr. Gaster. Of course it's Jessica. Of course it is. You saw how Asriel was, didn't you? He wasn't lying. He was telling you exactly what he saw. It was Jessica, down to the grey streak in her otherwise sickeningly perfect hair. It was Jessica.  
I scooped Betty up. Just before I could make it to the couch, the weight in my arms went suddenly slack, and Betty was heavier than normal. I looked down. She'd fallen asleep in my arms. I smiled a little, even though just looking at her sent chills through me as well, and set her on the couch next to where Sans was before. But Sans himself was hoisting on his sneakers and zipping up his hoodie, a soldier being deployed off to war. He had to catch himself on the stairs, and while he tried to play it off as a sort of joke to make Asriel laugh, I saw him wince. Once he saw me, he knew he couldn't hide it. Not even for one second. He'd known it since he'd broke his arm as a child, and he'd sure know it now.  
I went over to him. "Son, are you sure you want to do this?"  
"'Course I do. I mean… if I don't do this, we don't have anything to free Paps with." He twiddled a little with the threads in his hoodie. "Besides… don't you want to indict Jessica?"  
The word punched me. Of course he knew. He knew the whole time.  
"Yes, I do, son. But-"  
But what?  
"Look, Dad." His blue eyes looked right into mine. "I know you don't want to let her off the hook. And to be honest, I don't want to either. With all of the completely amazing things that she's done for all of us, I don't think she can be let off the hook. I don't want to be self-righteous or anything. I just want to point out what I know. Just… don't let it dictate all of your actions, alright?"  
I promised him I wouldn't, waved him goodbye, and him and Asriel exchanged the same best-friends handshake they normally include Chara in before they left. As they headed down the driveway, I tried to shout out a last minute "be careful!", but if they heard me, they didn't turn around. I closed the door after them after pausing for a few seconds.  
Don't let it dictate all of my actions.  
I suppose I can try to.  
Betty still slept on the couch, and just before I was about to wake her up and ask her if she could work with me in figuring out what her SOUL is, just before I was about to figure out what it is that made her feel so strange every time that I even thought of her, the phone rang.  
Just like that, I was redirected. Just like that, I was pulled to thoughts of seeing Jessica in jail, the monsters all circled around her, ready to throw whatever insults launch out of their mouths. Just like that, her SOUL is a mystery for a few more hours. Just a few more hours. But how long those hours are.  
That just might have been the worst mistake I've ever made.


	11. Chapter 11

"Hello? Who is this?"  
"Doctor, it's Asgore."  
"Oh, um…" A little fiddling with the papers on my desk. "Hello. How's it been?"  
"It's been alright. Although tensions have been skyrocketing lately…"  
"Tell me about it. They're telling me they've only got this year left at the university for me, and…" I hadn't talked this much to him in months. Why should I talk to him now?  
"I'm sorry to hear about it." I could hear him clearing his throat.  
"Well, it puts a little time on my hands."  
"Yes. We always need to count our blessings, don't we?"  
Now I know why I haven't talked to him in forever. He's too didactic. Sometimes, I think he's imagining that he's still on his throne.  
"Asgore… if you don't mind, we actually have a situation here."  
"Well, I'll make sure to see it through."  
If only you'd said that all those years ago. Maybe I'd be calling you more often. Maybe I wouldn't have to cringe every time I see you on the news. Maybe I wouldn't have nightmares about what happened then.  
I don't say anything; saying something would scare Asgore away. People have always warned me about my position, about not stepping over people in order to get where I need to or want to. But they never said anything about relying on old friends, even if the relationship may not necessarily be that way now.  
"My son was arrested by the Human Security Organization, and…"  
I was about to say, "and my other son has been attacked by Jessica Rutrow", but saying that would make me want to cover my mouth.  
"...and there may have been more than one perpetrator in how this whole thing may have turned out. We're attempting to gather information right now…"  
I could feel the tension tightening as I tiptoed around the subject.  
"...and with your position, we're asking if you can free Papyrus at all."  
"Yes. I mean, I can try, G, but…"  
Don't call me that.  
"But what?"  
I let him pause for about thirty seconds before I tried my "hello"s again. He finally continued.  
"But I'm in the same position as your son is right now."  
"What are you talking about?"  
"Didn't you go to the hearing?"  
"No, I wasn't there. I had to take care of Betty."  
A pause that seemed even longer, even though I counted to ten. I heard a sigh. "Well, Doctor… I'm sorry to hear about that. The humans managed to have better lawyers, and...well… I hate to say, but… I'm in the county jail now. They're not telling me when or if I'm going to go appeal my case."  
A little punch went towards my heart, but didn't quite make it. I wish I could say I was surprised at him being arrested for killing the seven children that fell in the Underground, but there was nothing I could say.  
"I'm sorry to hear about that."  
"We'll keep in touch, though, Doctor. Won't we?"  
I couldn't help but feel like he was a child, coming up to me, tugging at my jacket. I hated that feeling then. But I only hated it because I knew he needed me, and I needed him just as much.  
But not now. Not now.  
"Yeah. Yeah, we will."  
I hung up the phone.  
My pulse skyrocketed, and Betty stirred.


	12. Chapter 12

I take a few seconds to ask Betty what's wrong with her and if there is anything I could get her to make her feel better, but she doesn't respond. Of course, my fatherly instincts then kick in, fearing the worst, but as soon as I'm over there, I hear the snoring and the instincts back off in lieu of relief, and I pulled the blankets over her. She smiled, and it was then that I was reminded, if for a second, what I wanted as a father.  
But something's troubling. It was a little bit of everything about her, I suppose. Her hair had a pink streak on the tips, not containing any hair dye (which I had found out a few hours ago, of course, by chemical analysis). She breathed, and she breathed quick, like a lab dog or a German shepherd in the cop shows Undyne loves to watch. And each and every time I looked at her, she… sent a chill through me. And she still sends a chill through me each and every time I think of her.  
But that didn't make any sense. I was a scientist; I wasn't supposed to believe in any premonitions, any superstitions, anything that would make my college students be up to their arms in laughter.  
So I laughed at myself, although the laugh was strange, traveling down my arms instead of up and giving me another chill. Research. Research is the way to calm down these superstitions. A few paragraphs in, and I'll already be put to rest. It's happened before, and it'll happen again.  
I took out the human-monster history book I was working on. It was riveting enough to keep me sitting on the chair, but not quite glued, and just boring enough for me to put it down every so often. Since it was in a different language, the language monsters would often use before English took over by storm, the book posed no shortage of difficulty, and it took an hour to read each chapter. The first was a foreword, signed with what must be someone's insignia, but looks for all the world like whoever wrote this spilled his jar of ink on it. This was one of the things that sent a chill down me, and I realized I couldn't find any respite from it other than turning the page.  
The first chapter, complete with illuminated manuscripts that pointed it to somewhere around the 13th century, detailed a history between Agate and Copper Lightvale, each of them fighting through the throne in the throes of siblinghood. While it didn't appear so… the ruling was harmonious to a fault… they were in fact fighting about one conflict, one issue that seemed to tear the both of them apart. Each night after they finished their duties, they would argue behind closed doors as if they were the most sadistic, abusive couple that ever was about whether or not the monsters should continue to be sealed down Mt. Ebott (a common political issue back then). While Copper would sneak out almost every night to try and make some progress on destroying the barrier, Agate would always catch him, screaming to him about keeping the peace.  
I shuddered. More often that not, reality is often more enthralling than fiction.  
It continued on like this until one night when Agate caught Copper, she accused him of committing treason. Copper told her that this was impossible, since both of them were ruling the throne, and Agate wasted no time following her instincts and challenging her brother for the throne. The agreement was that if Copper won, Agate would exile herself and let her brother carry out his agenda, the opposite happening if Agate won. Since Agate was the more clever one, she knew that either way, she would have the upper hand.  
The battle lasted for days, each and every thousands of words lasting for a day, turning into a siege as factions formed for and against Copper Lightvale, forming into armies and transforming the somewhat simple conflict into an all-out war. The monsters at the barrier were nearly forgotten, and soon, most of the soldiers didn't know what they were fighting for other than their own lives, as does happen in so many of the wars I've been studying. But Agate and Copper worked tirelessly to make sure the goals engraved themselves into their minds.  
After years, thanks to Copper's Determination and the Determination that encompassed the majority of his army, Copper eventually managed to confront Agate herself, and quickly bested her. According to the agreement, she exiled herself, and thanks to the humiliation of having lost, she could no longer fight using her Bravery magic, her SOUL rendering null and void. She spent years roaming the island, performing studies and the worst of experiments on all sorts of inhabitants, attempting to find something more powerful than Determination.  
One day, when discovering a young boy who had killed dozens of other boys his age and believed by the villagers to be possessed by a demon, she found it.  
After taking in the boy to her home, the villagers grateful for having gotten rid of him, she conducted more experiments on the boy that left him furious and more vengeful than ever before. With these experiments, she found that somehow, in some way, the boy's SOUL had been changed.  
Tragically, thanks to her, the boy died of sheer neglect. Her research ground to a halt, and she became despondent until one night, she constructed a boat made from wood in a clearing away from where the rest of the villagers were and, using the courses she had taken on astronomy before her exile, steered her way back to one of her good friends. He hid her and smuggled her to a library, as primitive as it was, and she spent weeks studying and studying.  
To Copper's great surprise and dismay, Agate returned with a power called… called…called... and a genuine ink spill did happen, I suppose. I couldn't see the word after it.  
I shone all types of lights on it, used some gentle chemicals to try to remove it, but all I managed to do was to change the ink spill from black to a slightly purplish substance. I could heard Betty stirring back and forth, back and forth, and when she got up and asked me what was happening, there was a deep gurgle in her voice.  
Fearing the worst, I flew back to the couch with her, and getting the stethoscope, I started ruling out the possibilities. Pneumonia… no. Bronchitis… no; there was no coughing. And there was no injury, either; I ruled that out when I first began. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that it was only laryngitis, telling her to go back to sleep and not use her voice any more than she had to before returning to my work.  
The book's text lunged at me again.  
With this power, Agate managed to deplete Copper's power, much to his army's dismay, and Copper passed on within the hour. Agate's armies regained their momentum faster than anyone could have imagined at the time, and in a few hours, they managed to nearly wipe out Copper's army. While the kingdom did fall into disrepair because of the destruction the battle caused, Agate promised to establish reforms across the kingdom to restore it and build it up until it was even grander than it was first there. She also sought to improve literacy, although those goals weren't quite outlined. The citizens highly appreciated her, and she was held banquets nearly every half week.  
During one of those banquets, however, she developed a sharp pain in her chest. After consulting with the same friend who guided her to the library, they realized the pain was due to her SOUL not being able to cope with its change from Bravery to its final trait. Knowing her time was running short, she fled to a clearing nearby and, entrusting the kingdom's rule to a distant cousin, performed her final spell.  
In actuality, this was probably a pain-reducing spell. However, according to legend, she sacrificed her SOUL to create a creature that has long been described as the most destructive and ravenous being imaginable, whose sole purpose was to ensure that monsters and humans never lived in peace. But such creature has never been found, and the legend was most likely established by early Christian cults in order to encourage obedience among children.  
According to this legend, the SOUL trait of this monster was pink, and this trait was aptly named "Fear".  
Everything inside of me stopped, and I could feel my heart exploding inside of my throat. Fear? Fear?! This is only a legend, don't get yourself worked up- fear?!  
Everything inside me jumped back into gear, the thoughts battering in my head at such a pace that I don't pay attention. And I don't waste any time. I try not to waste any time in general, but now I spring from my seat, speedwalking over to where Betty was.  
But by the time I made my way to the living room, the couch was empty.  
The front door was open.  
And a chill punched its way indoors.  
All the way down my arms.


	13. Chapter 13

I must have run a half mile looking for Betty. I must have.  
If any neighbors saw me or called out, I didn't see. I didn't hear. I couldn't see. I couldn't hear.  
So I climbed into my sedan after the quickest of mutters to Chara that I would be back from the few minutes. Five minutes of driving to the Anti-Monster Department, and I saw someone on the road. I could point out the silhouette from a mile away if it weren't for the sun.  
"My God."  
It was Asriel. It was Asriel.  
An annoying itch flared up my left eye- I figured it was some sort of dust speck- then a glaring hole of pain. And then came the images. I was always told they would come if something horrible would happen to Sans, but they never told me what. Besides, it was all superstition. All superstition. Superstition aside, I still can't describe how horrific were the images that came. Images of the worst things, of the decay of the rose-tinged future I thought of for myself at the first step from the mountain. Images of blood, although I didn't know who or where it came from. Eventually, when I blinked, blinked hard, and the images fell away and shriveled, their eyes still glazed and glaring at me, I noticed where the blood was coming from.  
It was coming from a trail that was supposed to lead to the Anti-Monster Department building. It was coming from Asriel's clothes, weeping and seeping on the outside. Asriel lay in front of one of the street poles, the summer heat turning the blood into a slightly lighter shade, the summer heat sticking the clothes to the pole, looking as if it were absorbing them.  
I didn't ask any questions, didn't allow Asriel any leeway. God, I didn't see what was in his hands.  
It was my son's hoodie.  
I didn't know it. And he didn't know it either, at least not all the way through. All that my brain could tell me to do was to pull over, to scoop up Asriel and buckle him in the sedan before we rushed back to the laboratory, hands almost looking as if they were shaking the steering wheel as fast as they could. Once I was there, I took him out, and instead of lolling forward, to my great relief, he stood up on his own.  
Once he got in the house, he did much more than stand up. His eyes were wider than anything, wider than a camera's aperture with the opening on full display for all the world to see. He was panting quick, like a German shepherd that Undyne loves to watch in her cop shows-  
"You, left, the, TV, on..."  
I muttered a "thanks", not even thinking to shut the door behind me. Chara came in tow, hounding me, asking me what was happening, what was wrong with Asriel, but I couldn't, didn't say anything. I could feel my heart bursting, every inch of tissue feeling as if it was on the point of explosion, but I couldn't imagine why other than the images that battered me earlier. I could feel the dread pouncing at me, but still I couldn't imagine why.  
I couldn't imagine why all of that escalated when I saw what was on the TV in the first place. It was some sort of commercial about the summer Olympics, blaring over and over about javelins, javelins, javelins. But when I turned off the remote and the TV finally stopped screaming, I noticed I was shaking.  
But that didn't matter. Nothing mattered when I looked at Asriel. He had collapsed in the floor just leading to the living room, eyes entranced in the TV, shaking at least three or four times harder than I was, tears sweeping down his trembling cheeks every once in awhile, breathing faster and faster and faster, the oxygen only adding to his shaking.  
I immediately knew what it was, and it was fear. Not the type that happens when one is scared, but something far more serious. Trauma. This fear had seeped so hard into his brain that it had left something there, permanent damage. Something had happened with him in that camera room, and I wanted to find out what. I needed to find out what.  
God, if I found out sooner. Maybe I wouldn't be the man I am today. Maybe better, maybe worse. More recovered, perhaps. But I certainly wouldn't be the man I am today.  
That wasn't happening with Asriel like that. I called Toriel, told her to come as soon as she could, telling her as soft as I could that Asriel's adventure in the camera rooms may have resulted in some post-traumatic stress. She yelped, dropped the phone, called Asgore's name, and I shut off the phone. I told Asriel to try and get some rest in hopes that some sleep would clear up his emotions, and he nodded, falling asleep on the couch within a minute, breath still fast.  
I wish I could say I took a sigh of relief after that, but I didn't. That fear I was feeling, while not quite escalating to trauma, only escalated. Darn it, I couldn't even last a minute without having to wipe a piece of slightly dirty sweat off of me and onto the waiting poplar floor.  
I told Chara that something had scared Asriel. When I grilled him on if he knew what PTSD was, he only shrugged and fiddled with a piece of skin on his arm. Perhaps he was just as scared as I was. I wouldn't blame him.  
That half an hour was some of the longest time I can recall. Even now I wake up at one, two, three in the morning, and my brain springs to life, muddling over those thirty minutes. It's almost a ritual now, and a ritual that I use to keep myself from becoming an insomniac and needing more melatonin than I already use. I combed through the books, nearly dropping the Human-Monster History volume on the floor, but only plopping on my desk so that Chara wouldn't have to hear. I remember reading through the foreword, reading through the index, a sigh almost letting itself exhale its way out of me when I realized that nothing in there was going to mention the human-monster war.  
Thirty minutes, almost thirty forewords. My bookshelf was a mess by the time it was over, and it likely would still be a mess by the time the day was done.  
I woke Asriel, hoping the incomplete sleep cycle would let him stir back to life, but not completely. Enough drowsiness would most likely keep him from entering his state of acute trauma. I considered going downstairs and grabbing some of the mildest tranquilizer I had from the cabinet just in case, but it punched me in the gut. This was Asriel.  
I asked him what happened, and I heard Chara's footsteps teeter in.  
"We were with the cameras, and we saw, we saw, we saw, we saw Jessica fire the gun, and we saw, we saw the night Betty was in your house, the cameras caught her outside, even though she was supposed to be in your lab… we knew something was wrong with her, oh Jesus, oh Jesus…  
Jesus don't take 'im… and she came in the door, and Sans told me warn the others, warn the others, I have to warn the others, warn the others, warn the others…"  
He kept on going like this for two minutes, and I had to put a hand on his shoulder to keep him going.  
"Warn the others, I have to warn the others… Sans tried to teleport, but Jessica came back, and…"  
Jessica. Dam her. I could feel the warmth start to creep towards my vision, turn the edges into a momentous throbbing pattern.  
"She shot him… he was in so much pain… then I saw Chara, he was right in front of me… but somewhere inside me, I knew it wasn't Chara, I knew it wasn't… then, she turned into Betty again, and she threw the javelin, and… he teleported in front of me, and…and…"  
Back and forth, over and over. He rocked back and forth, and the tears shook him, turned him into an earthquake.  
"Right in the chest… I'm sorry, I'm sorry…"  
He clung onto me, almost dug his fingernails into me. "I'm sorry, Dr. Gaster, I'm so, so, so sorry… I shouldn't be here… I'm so sorry…"  
Later that night, Toriel would tell me that while she washed his shirt, she saw a piece of hardened sugar falling off of it. She said she wondered what I let Asriel eat that day, even through that should have been the last thing on her mind. Her way to cope with it, I suppose.  
She said it looked a little flat, with a few even tinier ridges on the side. She crushed it, disintegrated it. And she didn't think about it. She didn't even think about it.  
It was only months later when I realize she'd crushed a tiny piece of my son's sternum.


	14. Chapter 14

Part Two: Back


	15. Chapter 15

But Toriel wouldn't come home until that night.  
Chara covered his mouth at first, stared a thousand miles into what was nowhere. And then the tears came, steady and steadier. He sat down, the chair sinking into him instead of him sinking into the chair, and a few more tears came down. Only a few.  
Only a few. If only I was given just that much. But then I'd be a true monster. He was my son. He was my son. He was my son. He was my son.  
I turned into a black hole. I turned into a trap, ready to snap its teeth shut at any second. The world could have all but disappeared. I processed it all through a fog of short sentences and thoughts, all raging to a climax, thousands of mini-climaxes each and every second. I was falling into everything. I was falling out of everything. I existed. No, I didn't exist. Most of the time, I wasn't sure if I was or not. My head was a dampening towel, twisting the more I tried to think. Tried to think I did, and the towel twisted. If I tried to process, the towel twisted even more. He was my son. Oh, God, he was my son.  
"No."  
It was a whisper, just quiet enough for Asriel not to hear, but just loud enough so the rest of me could. I didn't know what I was protesting against at first, but I realized I was protesting against something I couldn't control.  
I lost him. I lost him.  
I lost him.  
It should've been me.  
I shouldn't have been too late. Why was I always too late? It shouldn't have been him. It shouldn't have been him. Sans. No. No. No.  
"No." Asriel could hear it this time.  
I felt my hands shaking before I looked down at them, and when I did, I found that Asriel's hand had latched onto it. Chara was still drifting at the side of the room, having as much ease processing what had happened as I did.  
"Let go."  
The shaking moved to my chest.  
"But, Dr.-"  
"Please let go! Didn't you hear me?"  
The shaking moved to my head, and I sprung off of the bed. Asriel's hand recoiled, and he took a few skittering steps, hugging himself as if he could stave off the fact that the pictures on the wall were only echoes for someone who wasn't there. Wasn't there. He was my son. He was my son. He didn't deserve to die like this. He didn't deserve to die at all.  
He didn't deserve to die.  
The first tear skirted down my face, the second following it when I realized I was staring directly at Asriel's shirt, directly at the red spattering the middle. If it was Asriel's blood, I would have been absolutely terrified, attempting to conceal it behind countless books and procedures and bandages. But I knew it wasn't. I wanted to get the bandages now, but I knew it wasn't Asriel's blood. It wasn't Asriel's blood. Instead, it had belonged to-  
This was probably what made me snap.  
I was everything. I was nothing. I switched into everything again, and then I turned into something else. Something my eye, my eye that had burned and showed me those horrible, horrible images, created. Something I'd never met before. My hands flew, and grief sprung to flight after them. Grief knocked down the vials, spilling the ink across the floor. Grief snatched the Human-Monster History book off of the ground, found the page with the spill on it, ripped it until it was dust. Grief found the picture of all of us, all of us, all of us, Sans still in the background, smiling. Smile on, smile on…  
I heard Chara shouting, yelling, gripping Asriel's hand, yanking him out of the house. Grief upturned the pillow cushions, stole the fluff from them until they were deflated, flatter than the cloud I found my mind drifting through. Grief seized the kitchen table as if it were a doll and smashed it on the floor again, once, twice, three times.  
Right in the chest, Asriel had said.  
Then, Grief found the too-fresh memories, and with it, the powers, innate, hidden, unbridled. Grief found them all and threw them to the windows, and they shattered in a lightning-burst of grief. Sans. My Sans. My son. Gone. Gone.  
Grief.  
Grief wasn't finished with me yet, at least for that first time, for that worst time. It took the curtains and twisted them until they were nearly unrecognizable, plucked off the chair and threw it against the wall, sending the books around it flying. Grief sustained them, churned them around, spun them until the pages ripped out before heaving them on the ground again.  
Grief surveyed the room. I wondered how I could have let this happen. How Betty could have let this happen. How Betty could have thrown that weapon into my son's chest without feeling a thing.  
But I felt everything.  
Grief returned one last time before settling and churning inside me, but never quite as rambunctious or devastating as it was before. Grief did one last errand… picking up the mug my son had given me… before leaving.  
And I smashed that mug.  
I smashed it. Grief didn't. I did. I smashed the mug with everything I was and everything he wouldn't be. I smashed it for Papyrus' freedom. I smashed it for Sans' blood. I smashed it for myself. For everything I wouldn't be.  
I felt everything.  
I felt Sans' spare left slipper, left on the outskirts of the kitchen instead of under his bed. I felt it clutched to my chest. We'd bought it as soon as we went up to the Surface, and he'd snuck it at the bottom of the shopping cart and told me to hide it. And then he smiled. He smiled, my God, he smiled.  
I couldn't be here anymore. Not after that smile.  
I felt the grass outside. I gripped it, gripped the slipper. I felt myself sink into both, sink into the grass, even though I knew I was only sitting.  
I let the sobs come.  
Ten, a hundred, a thousand.  
I didn't care who saw.  
I was a howling dog.  
And I didn't care who heard.


	16. Chapter 16

Time passed by, although I didn't quite know how until I saw one of the stars twinkle in a rain puddle next to my house. A minute passed by. Thirty minutes. An hour. I could say that I felt the sky change from day to evening, but I didn't. I felt it, but it was obscure, something buried outside of what the could I was drifting through could handle.  
How was I supposed to live?  
Here I was, nothing more than a heap in the backyard, a trashed house behind me. What type of father was I for leaving my son like this, a javelin resting where his heart should be?  
I looked behind type of father was I for leaving everything like this? What type of person was I? There were things to be done; I knew that much. I needed to see if there were any people who were willing to go back into that helhole that was the Anti-Monster Department's back room and collect what was left. I needed to research if there were any burial sites that were close to the mountain that were friendly to monsters. I needed to move the things out of his room and see if there were any people who would be willing to buy them without me telling them what sickening thing had happened to the owner. I needed to do so many things, so many things.  
I needed to find out what the hel I was supposed to do with the scholarship money he was supposed to spend on many things. I needed to call Papyrus-  
Papyrus.  
What type of monster was I?  
My son was dead.  
Why was there any need to focus on anything trivial?  
I fell back, backwards, into the cloud. Or to be more precise, I fell deeper into it. And I stayed there. I was happy to stay there. There, everything could be translated into what I could best describe as a horrible dream. There, nothing would be real. None of the relationships I made, none of the things I would ever have the honor of seeing or hearing, not the mountain birds as they flew through the trees in the springtime, none of it would ever be real. But then again, the little-void inside of me, the aching song of my son not being here, wouldn't be real either.  
For awhile, I couldn't tell what was real even here and now...only what the cloud produced and what it didn't. And it didn't produce the sound of Asriel's gentle sobbing as he said he wanted his mother and father, of Chara saying that he would call them for help. The sound of Chara's footprints scurrying back to the house wasn't quite a throb to my head, but almost approaching it. The thunking of the wood against my deck sounded hollow, as if I could hear every knot and every crack, but not any of the actual wood itself.  
The cloud didn't produce Alphys' hand on my shoulder sometime later, either.  
I came up slowly. I came up, and the mourning moon had almost reached the top of the sky. I came up, not quite out of the cloud, never really quite out of the cloud. I came up stretching each and every vertebra for one second each until I sat tall enough to feel the newfound breeze on my cheeks instead of at the top of my head. I came up...and I tried to reconcile myself to this new world I was subjecting myself to, but I never really did. Just like I never came out of that cloud.  
"Gaster, I'm sorry."  
This was real. I knew that much, at least.  
I turned around and looked at her, and something in my eyes must have frightened her, or at least saddened her, because she took a few steps back onto grass that I didn't quite feel was real yet.  
I knew she couldn't say anything else. So like I child, I repeated after her. It was inane, even stupid for a scientist like I was, but I repeated it.  
"I'm sorry."  
This was too real.  
The thoughts came together, but they burst together like tattered string instead of the puzzle pieces that normally trod their way towards each other.  
"I'm sorry for all the mess." I almost tried to build up the energy to laugh. "I'll…I'll clean it up when I'm ready." I didn't know I could cough up my own tears until that night.  
"Don't worry." Her voice was clearer than I'd heard it in months. "I'll clean up the mess for you. After what you guys went through, you shouldn't have to clean up this much of it."  
I followed her. At first, I didn't know why. The wood still hollow, I held onto the slipper as if it were some sort of explosive, crunching it tight to my chest. And I suppose she didn't know why, either. She looked back at me, her eyes coming into some sort of resigned surprise, before going to the kitchen, muttering to herself for just a few seconds, and scraping up some of the dust I had somehow flung over to the back door.  
Asgore came in behind us a few minutes after some fruitless scraping on some of the charred marks Grief had slashed on the wall. His children were in tow, although Toriel sprinted as fast as she could to Asriel's side, scooping him up. Asriel struggled for nearly a few seconds before becoming much too limp to have any sort of enthusiasm with him.  
He didn't have that same smile behind his eyes that I usually saw, but he still tried a few moments before letting it slide back down. He gave me a pat on the shoulder, told me that I was a good father for my son to do something like that. He turned away, went to attend his son, never looking me in the eye.  
But the funny thing is that I wasn't a good father at all.  
Even the start was rocky, at best. Ever since my wife went to… well, where my son is now… I've always been much more than rocky. I've been incompetent, which is all but a curse word in the science world. I couldn't give them any good genetics. Papyrus ended up on the spectrum, Sans ending up not being able to have so much as a scraped knee without bleeding so much he almost entered into a mild stage of hypovolemic shock. And because of my job, I must have spent years away from them both. At first, it was a couple of weeks not being able to come home on time. Then a month. Then Sans had grown an inch, Papyrus growing one and a half. By the time a bout of osteomyelitis struck me down enough for me to have to stay at home for a couple of weeks, Sans knew how to work the stove and sort the laundry, things he never would have needed to know at the age of nine if I was there.  
The funniest thing is that I can sometimes feel the people reading this. I can feel them laughing along with me on some of the things I say, although that's not as important as what I want to tell. But more than anything, I can feel them judging me.  
People say my son has always been a good judge.  
But as soon as Asriel came home and told me that news, it was as if everyone else turned into a twisted version of the judgement my son used. Even now, I can feel their eyes pressing on me, slamming my heart into the ground, stamping on me.  
So I have to hold on to one thing, just one thing that keeps me whole.  
I didn't kill him.  
As unbelievable as I think it is, I didn't kill him. Betty did, and each time I think about it, more than one person asks me why I'm shaking and if I'd had enough sleep that night. I didn't kill him. I didn't even remotely think of hurting him either, and any thoughts I had I'd abolish by spending more than a few hours in my work.  
But there was one person who did. One person who fired that gun.  
She came into the door, hair tousled, a little trickle of blood pouring down her mouth as it should. Asriel sprang out of his mother's arms and came to my side, staring at Jessica. Something built up in him, something alarming, something that should never even think of building up in someone this young. But it still built up in me.  
Jessica and I made eye contact, and I punched her until I heard her nose crack.


	17. Chapter 17

Coma. Coma.  
Everything inside of me wanted to follow him. No. NO. How cruel could someone be to bring him back only to snatch him up, dangle him by the strings of his hoodie between heaven and earth?  
But I couldn't. I couldn't.  
I would have expected myself to rush off to the lab, to yank Sans in one hand and Papyrus in the other, sprinting off, almost trampling over everyone in my path. To run the tests, to turn on all the devices I needed to, to run my hands through all the paper I needed to to prove that no, he wasn't in a coma.  
But I didn't.  
I didn't.  
I stayed there, and Papyrus' face fell, and I ran more tests, all of them proving to be arbitrary. I glanced over at Papyrus, and he fiddled with the floor, feet- a tossin' up the floor, tossed one of the read threads in his scarf up and down in his hand. I was so proud of him. So proud. Whenever I looked at him, I could feel my smile brighten, my heart swell. He was my son, and he had bonded us in an unshakable certainty. I was so proud of him. So proud that I would write a book about him later…  
Right to the moment. I had to do something, but I wasn't quite sure what it was. Eventually, Papyrus whimpered. Once was enough.  
With a brisk little, "C'mon, let's go to the lab," we were off. Papyrus didn't even think of asking me if it was the same lab as in the Underground. Taking us there would be a relatively long journey. A half a mile. Relatively long. Not a short distance to someone tall, someone limber, someone who could run at least two miles without stopping and could run a half a marathon if they pushed themselves to insanity. But to someone whose lungs had already seen too much of the cold, it was more than enough.  
We were at the barrier, the top of the mountain blaring in our vision. What a sight. The foundations that built up my limbs all but toppled, and I embraced Papyrus, the bundle still in my hands.  
I could still feel that breeze even when we were far inside the barrier, could feel it even when the purple door closed behind us. I could still smell the must here and there in the ruins, and with each step I walked inside that mountain, I could feel that bundle in my arms get lighter and lighter, light enough to where it felt like I could let it go with it flying up in the air like a balloon.  
My brain mistepped. That doesn't happen often. I've been in this lab for years, and the password always shone out to me, clear as day. But not now. Anytime but now.  
But as I stared at the door, there was something coming back to me. At first, I didn't know what in the world it was, but as I opened the door, as I laid my bundle down in the bed and took a seat in the recliner, I knew for certain that something was amiss. And then it grew worse and worse. At first, it was only a flashback that lasted for a second. But it was alarming; what the flashback was of, I didn't know. It was as if someone else's memories were being injected into me, that I was being used as a hijacked plane for someone else. It continued to worsen until I buried my head into my hands without knowing it, and it didn't stop until Papyrus had to be the one to hook up Sans.  
Yes. Logic had to bring me back now. There were no memories with logic.  
I looked over Sans, made sure the IV tubes were all in proper working order. Logic seemed to shake off these thoughts, these terrifying thoughts. I vowed to myself that I would get those thoroughly analyzed later. Later.  
As I fired up the computer to analyze Sans' condition, I heard Papyrus rummaging to the back of the room. As the diagnosis was almost complete, I, fearing the worst, mumbled for Papyrus to get me a pencil in the back room even though I'd brought at least three pencils with me.  
All I remember was clutching that chair, looking at the little boy to my left, hoping against hope and praying against God that everything would be alright. But the words "FALLEN DOWN" still appeared on screen; I hadn't hoped enough. I hadn't prayed enough. My suspicions were still confirmed.  
And when Papyrus came back, I remember shaking as I turned off the computer. When he asked why the machine had broken, I remember shaking without saying a word.

I remember still shaking after taking Sans back home… recoveries from comatose states tend to be more prompt when one recovers in their one home… still shaking after dinner, still shaking after a shower, almost slipping and falling on the shower floor, still shaking as I got ready for bed, still shaking as I slipped under the covers.  
That night, I remember that being the only night that I tossed them up and slept in the fetal position, almost freezing, the wind hollering like a banshee against the windows.  
Because I was scared that if I fell asleep exactly how Sans was, with the sheets still on him, with the pillow under his head, then I would never wake up again, either.  
And I didn't sleep.  
I didn't sleep, because each time I tried, I felt sleep sucking me in, and I kept on panicking that sleep would take me in for much too long, that I would be pulled into Unconsciousness.  
This battle, pulling me in, pulling me out, pulling me back in, pulling me back out, lasted until at least 2. Sleep was dodging me left and right, and following my instincts first, I went into Papyrus' room to make sure he wasn't awake, either. He wasn't, but he shivered almost as much as I did, and when I looked for a crack in one of his windows, I couldn't find any.  
I went downstairs, back to Sans' room. I toyed with various compounds, combed through the first few of Alphys' entries, her having received patients in that state. None of the compounds worked, but one did prove to block pain signals without having too harsh side effects, so I dripped a few into the IV tube and ignored the little twinge inside of me that told me to expect him to smile.  
As I was tossing the idea of going back to somewhere, somewhere, and grabbing some Determination, working the schematics as to how I could obtain something so volatile, I heard the chair on the other side of the room dragging out.  
Chara apparently had sleep evading him, too.  
"Hey, G." I almost told him not to call me that, but I managed to bit my lip, to toss the sheets in a rambunctious little fit in my hand.  
I turned around, asking him what it was, and, wouldn't you know it, his little brown eyes were all sad. They seemed to be looking into the distance, into the floor, into something that I was sure wasn't me. His sword was almost scraping the wits out of the bottom of my poplar floor, and before I could tell him no, he retracted it as if he knew what I was going to say all that time.  
All was quiet. The heart monitor gave a cadence to everything.  
"I… I think I may have something to add to your research."  
Beat. Beat. I nodded. Beat. Beat. Beat. He opened his notebook, where I found a few short entries, looking to be hastily done, looking as if the signatures that Jessica had scrawled all over her business cards had multiplied all over Chara's paper.  
In the entries, Chara had confessed that a little smattering of Hate had gone all over his SOUL. He'd done some fiddling around with some of the microscopes at the nearby school, and from what it looked to me, some of the nuclei appeared convoluted. While it didn't metastasize to his SOUL, I didn't want any of that happening.  
I had accompanied this problem once, exactly once, and that was years and years ago. Asgore himself had once stumbled down the stairs, hand on his SOUL, complaining of some sort of "green devil, a terrible miasma" he'd seen before he'd started to feel the pain. I was about to analyze him, to put a few compounds into his system, but a high-pitched wailing from a piece of metal being sharpened neutralized at least some of it.  
So I put a hand around his back, and he slumped against my shoulder. I looked back for a second, just a second, and I held my breath. After five seconds, I released it when I realized that, yes, there was still a beep echoing in the room every second or so.  
Do scientists think it's alright to kill people in comas?  
The question stayed with me until the lab, but I asked Chara about his family to distract him from the pain until we went there.  
By the time we were there, I learned two things, and two things only: one, that Toriel had once been in a pie contest and had won second place, the first being the judge's son, and two, that once Asgore was excluded from a school event just because he didn't have a blue shirt.  
And I smiled.


	18. Chapter 18

I heard her yell, but she kept it muffled. At first, she stared up at me, looking as if I was going to all but pound her into the Earth's core, but she did the one thing that I most certainly would not do if I was in her position… she closed her eyes. Although she hadn't gone unconscious… her legs were still jerking, her arms still struggling to pull mine off of her… her eyes were closed. I knew then that it was resignation, that it was something more than primal, something that was much, much more different than her firing that gun at my son until his hoodie started to smoke.  
But then I heard the others yell. Their voices overlapped against each other, some of the more voracious ones letting out a few expletives, but more than that, even more than that, I noticed there was one person who was silent. Silent even as Papyrus yanked me off of her, silent even as the last trickle of blood went down her nose before she pinched it.  
Asriel.  
It was Asriel, of all people, who hadn't joined me.  
My breath stopped on its way out before Papyrus fled to her, put a hand to her nose to repair what must have been at least a deviated septum. In a few seconds, I heard her stop breathing from her mouth, and a part of me that was colossal back then wished that that meant she'd stopped breathing entirely.  
But she'd stood up. And blow me down if Papyrus wasn't a mind-reader, because as soon as I thought that wish, he hoisted up Jessica and sat her down in the chair next to me. I tried taking at least one look at her, but she'd already turned herself away, hiding the majority of her face with a handkerchief.  
"We need to talk."  
I was more than glad to. After all, Asgore had seemed happy to migrate to the other side of the kitchen, as if what I'd done had spread some sort of awful, toxic gas.  
But something inside of me fought off the cloud, if only for a second or two. I don't know what started it, either. Maybe it was the sight of Jessica's hair, all tattered and tousled like a broom's bristles after being dragged through the snow one too many times. Maybe it was the sound I Papyrus made that I knew was utter disappointment when he sat down, somewhere between a sigh and a grunt. But whatever it was, something inside of me fought off the cloud. And the same thing that had fought off that cloud made me stare down at my hands and wonder for the second what the hel I was doing, what the hel I had done.  
"Papyrus, thank God you're out. But you should've let me-"  
What was I saying? This was a human. But after a few seconds, it only took the sight of the gun still tucked into her dress to I didn't let the flames of my lizard brain get out and transform themselves into words entirely, but I could still hear Jessica in the corner, taking one short heave as if she had something awful in her chest.  
"No. If I did, you would've hurt her even more than what you already did."  
What you already did. The cloud came back in full force, and he must have seen me slump just a little in my seat.  
"You and I felt it, Papyrus."  
"Felt what?"  
Now I'd done it. I'd steered myself directly where I didn't want to go in the first place. For the second time, I'd have to explain myself, which just about made me so uncomfortable in my seat that I had to sit up to keep it off of my mind.  
"If this itch hadn't been there, he'd still be alive."  
I'd said it. I'd said it, and Jessica didn't move, which in all sorts of ways was more startling than if she did move.  
Papyrus relinquished a slouch he'd been keeping to himself this entire time, and as he reared himself up to his full height, I realized I'd forgotten that he was, in fact, six foot two, his late brother only up to his shoulder the last time I saw him. He stood up, and it was as if my son gave me his shortness as a parting gift. I felt everything in me stop, rear up, yet everything inside of me also remind me that this was also my son. That despite it all, I was still a father.  
"Don't call her that."  
He sat down, and the shortness came to me even more. Before I knew it, I found myself slouching down to the point of my lower back starting to hurt, not wanting to come back up again. At least Jessica didn't look to witness this type of humiliation.  
"Hurting her won't bring him back, or anyone back. And she's here to help."  
I nodded. I knew this, knew all of this. If an Anti-Monster Department member showed up at my house without any sort of preamble, then I would be even more furious than I was. And perhaps Jessica wouldn't have lived as long as she did if she showed up to the door in her same, tiring, bureaucratic way. She showed up with her hand on her arm as if it was throbbing, looking straight towards the ground, crying, crying. I knew she was in the way that she shook, in the way that she sounded like she was laughing. If an Anti-Monster Department member showed up at our house crying, then they were here to at least tell me some news that would be remotely helpful before I could send them out again.  
Papyrus tucked his head over his shoulder, called out for Alphys. She didn't come until a minute later, and I wasted my time a little, asking Jessica what happened with Sans and how before she tucked her own head inside her shoulder.  
Alphys sighed, tucked her lab coat off to the side. "Alright, guys," she began. "So… about Betty. Let's start with what we know about her. Then we can talk about trying to put a stop to her. We know the police won't help us… Undyne especially knows… so we've gotta take this on ourselves."  
Always Alphys. Always the scientific one. Always the ambitious one. If I wasn't inundated with emotions, I probably would have taken her place, although who am I to say that? I can't relive any of this, and I most certainly don't want to relive any of this.  
"Gaster, can you go first?"  
"She's an asshole."  
Even Papyrus had to chuckle at that, and I felt the entire room swell in some sort of ripple that resembled what it was like before today. But too fast, too fast the ripple died down, and we all settled down into our own little clouds, into our own little thunderstorms.  
"Hehe...alright, w-we know that. I mean as far as facts?"  
"She has a pink SOUL, this much I know from research. As well as that pink SOUL representing fear."  
After "fear", I found that I couldn't say anything more.  
"Th-that's an excellent start." After tugging on her lab coat once, she shuffled through a hodgepodge of papers, muttering to herself as she went through each one.  
So we talked, and we talked, and although I do contribute a few short sentences, I still felt as if I was drifting through a dream world I can't quite discern as real yet. There were some things to me that echoed as real, such as the genuine wink Alphys gave Undyne when she used the word "pummel" to describe what we were going to do with Betty instead of "strategically eliminate." But other things, things such as the blow of the furnace, the trail of dust that still lingered on my bookshelf, that weren't real to me. That were too real to be real to me, if anyone can believe that. They're too real to be tangible, and all of the things that made them palatable are null. They're all null. Null. Null. Null!  
Now my thoughts started to combine the way they should. The Core… it had an emergency room that the university had built for "security purposes." I had originally planned it to be equipped with a nullifier one could use in case of an overflow of the magic in the geothermal plant, but based on some of the monsters that came home weak from that building, I think the university had some more xenophobic plans with it. That thing could eliminate any sort of magic, used by any human or monster.  
If it could do that, could it even destroy them?  
"The nullifier room."  
As if a rubber band had snapped, everyone stared at me. Jessica took a little while longer at first, but then her head finally raised from the crook of her arm. She stirred at something in her pocket, and I instinctively turned over to her in worry that the object in her pocket should be gun-shaped, but I couldn't find anything amiss.  
"W-what do you mean?"  
"The nullifier room."  
I explained everything about it, but also explained some of the confounding variables. Such as the need for the machine to warm up about a half an hour before it activated, the need for emergency transport… yes, yes, my thoughts were starting to come together. Everything was perfect. Everything was in place.  
I caught a glance of the telescope in his room, the door cracked open the slightest. No, it wasn't. Everything wasn't in place.  
But a few things fell into place. In an hour, we were all getting suited up, sounds of zippers and shifting plastic helmets hovering around my ears. Asgore was wishing the rest of us good luck, although resentment from a long, long time ago kept him from patting me on the back the way he did everyone else. Undyne was waving goodbye to us, having been told that Betty was unleashing some sort of plan against the city, although no one knew quite what it was yet. The last thing we packed in the bags was two teleportation devices… one for Alphys and one for Jessica. Undyne would have packed the third one, but with a nod, she said that I was a "pretty capable monster for an egghead."  
As I was strapping on my boots, one part of me wondering if I could still bring Papyrus with me while the other part knowing it would be foolish, and besides, he'd be better off without Jessica, she still came, speak of the devil. I barely heard the words come out.  
"I freed him, Gaster."  
"What did you say?"  
"I freed him."  
So she freed him. Hours and hours of research, more hours of frantically calling law enforcements, even some of the reasons why my son went to those cameras in the first place… none of those freed him. She did. When nothing else did, none of my scientific efforts did, she did.  
As we left the house, I was tall enough to knock her over, but I brushed myself to the side.


	19. Chapter 19

We went into the nullifier room, and there she stood.  
Betty. It makes me sick to call her that now. The word "Betty" starts at the bottom of my chest, taps the backs of my teeth, makes a sweet sound that reminds me of a bird's song.  
Betty came a few moments later. I didn't even bother to look at Alphys' worried face or Jessica's slightly less terrified one. I only saw Betty. Betty.  
"Alphys, you know what to do. Let me through."  
The door opened, and the creaking of the metal against the ground turned into a sort of grinding, and it prepared my instincts for the fight. I'd turn Betty into nothing more than that piece of metal. I'd do it quick, and I'd be home to have dinner with my other son. I'd do it ruthless, and I'd do it with a smile.  
This was the type of person she'd turned me into, and it was the type of person she'd get.  
Where did the cloud go? I'm not sure where the cloud went. But wherever it went, it filled me up and made me into something different, something I don't like to think about now whenever I wake up in the middle of the night.  
I was brutal. I was enigmatic. I was dazzling. For once, for once, I was everything my son wanted me to be and more. I was a god. And I hoped to God that Sans was watching from above and getting the best kick he'd ever had out of this.  
I must have done some things to her that would take medical paragraphs upon paragraphs to describe. I must have dislocated so many joints, broken so many bones, comminuting at least two. I must have slammed her head against the wall until she was slumped for the rest of the battle. I must have rendered her entire right hand unusable. I must have been what the Anti-Monster Department always thought I was and what I always thought I would be. Something I was always ashamed of becoming.  
A monster.  
But the funniest thing was I stuck far, far away from her the entire fight. While she lay clinging to the wall, I made my way to the center. Each and every time I tried to get even an inch farther away from her, the image of my son lying too still brought me brought me back to that same acute closeness. Each time I tried to get even an inch closer to her, her scythe cut and choked at me until the loose part of the sleeve underneath my arm was all but ribbons.  
I could get hurt.  
But in my eyes, I was still more divine than anyone else I knew. And I leapt towards her. I broke more of her, her arm trying to writhe itself into action after me shoving it into the wall. But there was one thing that was always constant: I never looked  
into  
her  
eyes.  
And I rejected everything. Each and every scientific principle, I tossed to the side. I was a flaming fire. I was a pool of water, submerged to the neck and blown on by winds chilled to the negatives. With each principle I tossed to the side, there was a part of Betty I took hold of, tossed to the wall. Her foot. Her hand. Her arm. She was my ragdoll.  
But never her eyes. Never her eyes.  
In an instant, I felt something stir. It started at my center, reaching in a vortex out towards the blind spot right in between my eyes, cascaded outwards. And in a sudden moment, it wasn't mine. I felt something uncontrollably uncomfortable, something I hoped I would never escalate into… dread.  
She was dread. And she was fierce.  
I could even feel my son leaving me.  
In a few seconds, I whipped around, noticed the same powers, the same blasters I had invented when I was a child, leaving me. She was taking them away.  
I couldn't let her do this. I put up my leg, barreled into her, did a part of what I thought had to be done, but she waved an adieu to me, and in an interval of time my brain couldn't process, the back of my head was slamming against the wall on the other side of the room.  
No. No. No. It couldn't be like this.  
I tried to reach out to her, to evoke every single image I could, each ounce of anger, all of them primal, all of them unwanted. All of them horribly, utterly unscientific. All of them cascading like waters on the beach.  
It couldn't be like this.  
It couldn't be like this at all.  
And Betty's hand had lifted, and she had turned me into her own ragdoll. What was once mine, those beautiful Blasters I had carved from my own sweat and love, was now in her hands, the same hands that grasped onto that stupid, serpent-javelin.  
Blood.  
Blood poured down.  
At first, I took a portion of it off of the back of my head, winced, and stared at it. It's a wonderful thing, one that I had only studied in humans up until then. The loss of it could cause confusion, such as I was very well under. Hemoglobin. It requires a complex cardiovascular system in humans, the heart to channel the blood through the veins, and when the blood grows deoxygenated, useless to any organ, it goes back through the capillaries or another waste system to the heart.  
It really is wondrous. And we were given that wonder.  
I didn't know why. But I couldn't react as what was once mine betrayed me. Betty made sure of it. I was back down on the floor, a piece of my own vomer lying safely in my palm. I was back on the side, and I coughed out this same wonderful blood. I was on the floor again.  
I was so fragile. So fragile.  
And I was such a failure. Such a failure.  
I looked up at the son. Could my son be there? I reached out to it, if only a little. My right arm was beyond repair, but my left hand could reach all the way past my head.  
And so what if he was there? What good would that do? I'd failed everyone. Where- where did Betty- Papyrus. Oh, God. I'd failed Papyrus. His smile made me close my eyes. No, I was unworthy of heaven, or wherever my son went. Heaven was a myth. I was a scientist.  
My son had went nowhere.  
And we'd all be headed in the same path.  
Betty. Where is Betty?  
Just as I closed my eyes, I felt my back explode, and the world turned black.


	20. Chapter 20

"Dad! Dad, where are you? Dad!"  
I was home. The heat surrounded me, and the furnaces churned in the background. My eyes were still closed, and they would probably would have stayed like that because of my back still feeling as if it was on fire. What have I suffered? A deep puncture wound. The only thing that could fix that was a good two hours of healing magic. The only thing-  
"Dad!"  
That wasn't Papyrus' voice.  
I snapped open my eyes, and I wasn't home. I wasn't home at all, even though I heard the whine of the heater churning and turning and tumbling away in the background. I wasn't home at all. I tried to yell out his name, but it stayed there, caught inside my throat.  
There were ocean waves, crashing all around. The lightning that cracked across the air almost blinded me, and at one point, I felt as if I was going to crash into the ocean. I was caught, but it wasn't his hand, it was a hard object, something that bruised my back as I fell.  
I looked back, and there he was.  
No blood on his chest.  
No javelin.  
I yelled his name even louder, and this time it came, although when it was out, it felt as if it had left someone else's throat, boggled around me before smashing me in the head, going back out again.  
"Come on, Dad!"  
He was being dragged out by the sea. The ocean lapped around his foot at first, and then ate it, moving on to the other foot in the next few seconds. I tried to grasp at him, to catch him, but he slipped farther, farther, and the waves crawled up to his legs. He fell, and the sand bruised his chin. My son, my son reached to me.  
"Come on, Dad!"  
Come on, William. You know how this works. As soon as you rescue him, come up to the shore and make sure there isn't any water in his lungs. And besides, you know how to swim. You've been to the beach before.  
I ran to the water, but the sand dug into the cracks of my phalanges, and soon, it was covering my feet. No. I couldn't lose him again. I couldn't.  
He waved, slipped under the waves again.  
I thrashed, writhed around. The thunder grew louder and louder, the winds around me turning into whispers, then yells. But after a few minutes, I realized I was being drawn closer, closer to the waves, and I took a too-deep breath, my ribs aching before I went under the waves.  
I could see. And I'll try to describe how beautiful it was. I couldn't hear the thunder, although the whir of the furnace was always, always there. The bubbles were entrancing me, turning into sparking, sparkling diamonds. And I could breathe. I could breathe.  
If only I could stay here.  
Perhaps I could.  
I ran to him, and my steps became more light. He smiled the way he always did, still no blood on him, and the sand that clogged my feet seemed to move away just enough that I could float. It was swimming, but a type that I knew no human or monster would be able to do.  
I was about a hundred feet away from him when the bruise appeared on my face.  
I realized I had slammed into something hard. Sans stopped reaching out his hand, a look of worry replacing it. I reached out in front of me, and with horror, I realized it was a giant slab of glass. A slab of glass was the only thing separating me from my son, a part of my life, a part of my hope.  
I banged on it. Sans recoiled, but I didn't care. I was going to get him out of this ocean if this ocean was going to keep on holding me back from him. I banged on it again. Again. Again.  
Just as my knuckles started to bruise until they were numb, the contusions running through them, I saw a crack in the glass. The water on his side seemed to escape into mine, a jet of compressed air.  
I looked up at him, and I expected to see him running towards me, running with outstretched arms and starry eyes, the way he would when he was a child after staying at school for a few extra hours.  
But it wasn't joy or peace, or even excitement, that ran through his eyes.  
It was pain.


	21. Chapter 21

I was home. The heat surrounded me, and the furnaces churned in the background…  
I didn't waste any time opening my eyes, and my other son stooped in front of me. His eyes were covered with the best type of relief, the type of relief to make me forget about that dream for the rest of the day. It was trivial, so trivial. Only a product of my brain having to sort through the grief that it has to, that's all.  
"Hello. Am I glad to see you up."  
God, his eyebags were practically reaching to the floor. How much healing magic did he use? I even saw him shaking when he sat down, and the others were staring at me for at least a second each despite what they were doing initially.  
How much healing magic was I worth?  
I sat up to hug him, and although I felt Papyrus relax and perhaps try to sleep for a few moments, I felt a pain in my chest almost worse than the pain in my back when I was fighting Betty earlier.  
Betty. I hadn't stopped her, not in a long shot. I'd left her laughing at the end of the nullifier hall, and Jessica- Alphys- Alphys-  
I tried to ask a "Where's Alphys? Is she alright? Because if she's not, we can still rescue her. We might be able to rescue Jessica, but that might be too much for us" before my chest lit up in horrible fire and I had to sit back on the couch.  
Is this how it feels to have a javelin inside it?  
I could almost hear Papyrus shake his head, and I craned my neck to see him fly to the living room, get the red plaited blanket he had knitted for me in the Underground, asking me to hide him from Undyne for fear of her disapproval. Undyne…  
"Where's Und-" The pain came back, doubling itself.  
"You need to rest." As soon as the words came out, I knew it was final. "You've had a… a rough day, to say the least."  
"Alphys, where is Alphys, she said-"  
"And she'd keep her promise. She's fighting her. And she's an extremely capable monster. I should know. I remember spending time with her when I was a kid knocking down dummies for fun and almost challenging me one time. But I knew that she couldn't be-"  
This did not help at all to the worry in my stomach, all knotted up, bunched up, feeling as if it would all fall out in gallons of ribbons. I almost tried to get up from the couch again, but Papyrus put a hand on me, and the last thing I wanted to do was to hurt the son I still had left.  
I bit my lip, and I was more than aware of the pain in my back now.  
"And Jessica? Is she helping her?"  
"She brought you here."  
I looked at her, and she was staring at her hands, trying to override their shaking.  
So she brought me here. Something doubled back inside of me… not quite went away, but doubled back. I didn't quite know what it was then, but I sure as ever know what it is now. Not that I was about to go up then and prance around, lauding her greatness and borderline divinity. Instead, I brushed back the plan I was formulating to bring her back to Alphys and replaced it with another one. A lesser one, but still one that would do what I wanted it to do.  
"Sans-"  
"Would be proud- is proud of you, Gaster. We both know that."  
My legs shook. I knew I couldn't stand up. I had suffered extensive nerve damage from all of the times I was tossed against the wall, and the tingling would likely never go away, even with medical treatment. But I still commanded my legs to shake.  
And in a few moments, they went rigid.  
I could hear Papyrus protesting, and I smiled at him, a toothless, wayward smile, and told him to go help Jessica if she was shaken up at all. It'd slipped out. Stupid me, it'd slipped out. Through all the pain, I'd said it.  
I put one foot in front of the other.  
It was that simple.  
If only there were other things in life that were.  
And part of me would always be in the sand that day, writhing, thrashing hard, willing with every ounce of my breath not to be dragged into the water…


	22. Chapter 22

My senses changed after that fight. They were more heightened. Of course, I knew that was only my amygdala going into haywire afterwards, but it still turned everything that was more stressful than stepping in a bath full of lavender petals into a short horror movie flash. Not terrifying enough to make me want to shrink away from it most of the time, but annoying, enough to make me want it to all stop. All of it.  
Even sitting down in the living room was something more of a hassle and something less than a fright. Saying hello to someone and asking them how their day was turned them into something like Betty, but something not frightening enough to make me shoo them away. Discussing what would happen in the future was one of the most arduous things I could think of, and discussing what would happen in the past was something I couldn't even imagine.  
On one of these discussions on the future, however, as I walked downstairs upwards, I discovered that movement, that work, helped me to stave off of this feeling. Little did I know then, but I started planning my own future from then on.  
I hadn't been the one to organize it. I wasn't in any condition to organize it. Rather, it had been Undyne and I had to give her the credit she deserved. She smiled at my thanks, and I tried to smile back, although something strange and frightening came out, or at the very least, awkward.  
Undyne's own smile faded as she limped to the guest bed, Papyrus bearing her up. It was then that I saw the gash in her side that had undoubtedly reached to her chest.  
When we all sat, I was the first one to ask any sort of question. The same question I had asked before, the same question that had probed this entire mess until it was taboo, unaskable.  
"What happened? What did Betty do to you?"  
It all came back in a burst of tears from her that I wouldn't think were possible if she hadn't shut the door. She told me that as soon as I fainted and Jessica brought me here, the second part of my plan would be brought into full force. She told me how it had gone wrong, how Betty was still there, still strong.  
As Jessica walked into the room, I dug my heels into the poplar floor.  
That was all she could say now that someone else was in the room. Undyne wiped her eyes, told Jessica that it was allergies, that's all, and Papyrus and I looked at each other in a silent covenant.  
The second part of my plan was something I thought unnecessary to even think of until now. It had been for Alphys to activate the machine the room had been hosting to kill anyone who was a human or monster. And by the way that Undyne was crying, something had gone wrong. Horribly wrong.  
I would never see Alphys fumbling along the scientific machines, smiling as always, keeping her entire life on her shoulders.  
I inhaled the loss, and it came to me in a complete wave of thought. She was gone. I would never see her again. I would never hear her laugh again. I would never pat her on the back again, slowing down her stuttering bit by bit. And I'd never see Undyne smile again, I feared.  
I exhaled, but it never completely left me. Loss never did. Nothing that happened while Betty was in full force ever did. Even then, she never completely went away.  
Papyrus was on the bed, squeezing Undyne's hand in comfort, her wrenching it away as if it were some sort of hideous worm I would find in my backyard and analyze to see if I could find anything exciting with it. Jessica stood up to combat it, but I parried her waist, stopping her from moving any further.  
I took a breath, and it hurt the upper reaches of my chest for awhile before I said it: "You're very determined." All I could say. All I could say for a loss such as this.  
Loss. What a word.  
She didn't look at me. She didn't look at anything, really; her gaze was fixed to her hands. At least she was doing better than I was. She was doing a hundred times better, in fact. At least she wasn't destroying everything around her.  
A nod, and I could finally continue.  
"Was that how you beat her?"  
Another nod. She tilted her face towards Papyrus. She most likely felt as if she was a child, and in her position, I would most definitely feel like one, one that had been beaten and stamped on by everyone else.  
"Yes, but I was only able to ward her off. I didn't hurt her or anything like that. Not permanently, at least. Something happened to her. I don't know what. She started yelling at her pink henchman thing… Kumu, I think… and going into a weird twitching fit. I wanted to hurt her, but all the damage I did during then just bounced right off. And when she was done, she healed all of the damage I did and escaped. That little itch."  
I didn't want to feel like the child here, so without thinking, I launched into my science-riddled speech. Papyrus looked at me with an odd mixture of sadness and worry, although I didn't give a second thought to it.  
"Your Determination can be extremely useful in the effort to stop that thing." Jessica tensed up for a while, as if I was talking about her the entire town, but then relaxed as if she were an accordion. "After performing some chemical analysis, I concluded that the food we're eating builds up blood. This blood helps to supply the Determination, which gives it an extra added 'boost'."  
Undyne nodded again. At first, I almost dismissed it, but I could see in the way that she looked up and had the frown chased away from her face for a split second it that it clicked in her head. She'd understood all of it.  
A little too excited this time, I jumped right back in. "That's why I'm proposing an experiment- er, future, possible future experiments, with the Determination in your blood. You were able to ward off Betty, or at least survive her, weren't you?"  
A fourth nod. "That was after-"  
"But you still managed to."  
I saw the tiniest trace of a ghost of a smile on her face.  
"That's what I'm going to pursue. Miss Rutrow, do you have anything to add?"  
I was too excited. Too excited. There was no way in the world that I would have allowed her to talk otherwise. But in any event, she said nothing, and I was too relieved for words.  
In fact, I even stewed up a plan.  
I stood up, thanked Undyne for her help, patted Papyrus on the back, and took Jessica into another room. She sat up at me, her being the child this time. I suppose I needed to be the adult all the time.  
I made sure to clear my throat before I spoke. A little roughness to it would ease all of this. "I wanted to thank you, you know. For saving me." Back then, it sounded sticky, sickly-sweet, much too sentimental to resolve any of this. "If you didn't, I… probably would have died back there."  
Her eyes lit up, and I turned into a cobra. A cobra that I swear, that I keep on swearing that I'll never turn into again.  
I locked the door, although it was quiet enough that neither of us heard.  
"You know who else died, don't you? My son. He was going into college. God knows what major he would have been in. God knows what he would have become. And I'm never, never in my life, going to recover from that."  
The lights faded, fizzled out, just like that. Tears didn't quite replace them, although I expected them to at first. "I'm sorry, Doctor… if you'd like, I'll-"  
"Do what? Do what? Do what you've done before? Hang posters everywhere, call us every insult you can possibly think of?"  
"I'm not… doing that anymore." Her hands clung to the chair.  
"Then what are you doing?"  
"I'm helping, aren't I?" She stood up. "I'm helping to free everyone from Betty, if you will. Look. I'm sorry about what happened. And I've gone over this with myself over and over again. I wish I could go back and shoot that stupid gun at her instead of him. But I can't. I can't, okay? I can't. And it's not like any of you are inexorable, either. Your king that you have there killed my daughter, you know. I had hopes for her. And she did too. She did too, alright? So if you're going to continue to treat me like this, then-"  
"You left her."  
"Excuse me?"  
"You left her, didn't you? Asgore told me everything. That little girl was so sad…"  
"Shut up."  
"She wanted you out of your job, didn't she?"  
"I said shut up."  
"You left her at that recital to finish paperwork, didn't she?"  
Finally, a tear. I stopped. My work was complete. I'd leave her alone now, at least for a little while.  
"Look. I can't do this anymore, Doctor. This is insane. All of this is insane."  
If only I knew what I'd done.  
Of course, I felt guilty. I felt guiltier then than anything I did. But then, I felt a rush. A certain type of rush. Not too high to make me want to do it again. But just high enough to take away any inch of regret. Everything bounced against me, helping to make me into the man I am today, apologizing for every act in the world there is to apologize for, staying up late at night, staring at my own ceiling, wishing I had the guts to take down the plastic stars on my son's ceiling.  
She shut the door, and she left me to collect her mind's blood in my hands.


	23. Chapter 23

When Papyrus found me, I was in my bedroom, gazing at the sunset. Inhale. She was gone. Exhale. It's Jessica. I wanted to blame someone. I've always wanted to blame someone. I just never thought I'd blame Jessica. And back then, I thought I wasn't blaming anyone.  
But this type of gazing was… different. I didn't have the same "oh-wow" type of wonder I had when we came up to the Surface. But it was simple. I didn't take any notes with me, didn't take out any plastic vials, didn't take out any of the college notes I was fixated on before all this happened. I just… gazed. I was there. And that was all that mattered.  
The sun's rays bounced off of me, all harmless, nothing more than a miniscule bit of dirt that had stained my shoes. They warmed me up, coaxed me, invited me. But I still felt… threatened. By what? Betty? She was gone. By Jessica? No; she had every reason to be afraid of me, not the opposite. By Papyrus? I couldn't be afraid of him. He was my son. Then what was I so threatened by?  
I realized how tall Papyrus was, how fully-grown, how confident, he was. All of these things made me proud, always make me proud. But his anger… I saw a glint, a hint of it behind his eyes, and I couldn't combat that. Perhaps that was what I was so afraid of.  
So there I was, dejected. Judged. A piece of trash tossed aside. So I didn't meet his eyes, pretending to have a keen interest in the poplar floor and the cross-stitches of my dress pants. But that couldn't erase the hurt on my face. And he very well knew that the hurt was there.  
"Hey, Dad," were the first words that I could hear.  
I tried to look towards him before darting my eyes back down to the floor, but I instantly knew it was so quick, so terse, that it was likely Papyrus thought I was ignoring him. So I mustered out a "hey" before going still.  
The funniest things. The funniest things Papyrus does. He has the higher ground, but he didn't stand, make me feel more like a child than I already was. He didn't sit down fully, either, staring at me straight in the eye. I could hear him shuffling, arranging himself, and I couldn't help but peep back to see what he was doing. By the time he was finished with his half-fidgets, he'd managed to sit so the back of his head was in tune with the back of my head. The funniest things. And through it all, it was exactly what I needed.  
I heard him sigh, and I couldn't help but tense. He cleared his throat in the quietest of ways, ever polite. "I feel like you could use a talk."  
Bewildered. Bewildered. That's how I felt at all of this. I was bored with my education from the age of five, obtained my doctorate at the age of seventeen, yet I was bewildered. How did Papyrus manage to shrug everything off? How did he not manage to join me in berating Jessica? Bewildered. Out of everything, that's how I felt. And it's something that still sticks with me today.  
"How do you do it?" I asked. "No matter what horrible things others may do to you…. you easily forgive them as if nothing happened."  
The folly of the wise. What a fatal revenge I gave to myself.  
My body tensed despite the spectacular rays of the sun. I winced, my eyes twisting yet another spear inside me That spear seemed to guide my hand until it grasped my sleeve and delved, dug into my arm. My mouth trembled, and then spouted words I didn't mean. Words I didn't know. Whether or not I was addressing them towards Jessica or Betty, I didn't know. I didn't know.  
I couldn't help myself from shaking a little while before the words came. "Did you even care? Did you just FORGET him, don't you FEEL A THING?!..."  
I could almost hear him clench his teeth.  
Fugitive seconds passed by as the sun it hid itself behind a cloud before jumping straight back out. The warmth tried to warm the chill. Tried to, anyway. I was still cold, no matter what it tried to do.  
"Of course I miss him, too, Dad."  
More moments passed by. Grief strangled me a little while, making me silent.  
"There's not a day that goes by that I don't miss him. Not a second."  
Not a second.  
There was no cold, but still I shook. The sun was spreading on me, still shining, but still I shook. "Which is why I don't know why you forgive her, when she's the one responsible for what happened to him…"  
It wasn't her. It wasn't her, and I full well knew it. Was she responsible for shooting the gun at him? Yes, she was. Was she responsible to standing by when the javelin was thrown? Yes, she was.  
But she wasn't at all responsible for what happened afterwards. She wasn't the one who had actually thrown it- with terrifying, perfect accuracy. She wasn't the one who had turned on him, wasn't she?  
And here she was- her conscience bleeding with a pain more exquisite than Betty could give to anyone.  
It wasn't her.  
"Dad…  
Of course I miss him. But others are grieving, too. You know, with Betty-"  
I made sure to correct it in my head to "that creature".  
"-wreaking havoc on the city, and… Alphys…"  
I heard the pain in his voice. She was his friend, and was his friend much more than she was mine. She was my colleague, whereas she took the role of "older sister" to Papyrus.  
I opened my mouth, but the story still streamed out of Papyrus' mouth.  
"But I can't let others see me sad because I know they need someone to look up to. Someone to comfort them."  
I glanced down at my hands, overwhelmed at the blurriness that went running by for a second, just a second, before going away.  
His voice started to give. "It's been so difficult lately… everyone is sad… everyone is getting hurt…" A tear slipped down his cheek before ending its little journey on his glove.  
I sighed. I was no good at this. What could I possibly say to comfort him? He was the comforter; he'd just said so himself. Hel, I couldn't even comfort myself.  
"Papyrus, I-"  
He interrupted me again, and I sat back, the passion tumbling out of him.  
"But that just means I have to try twice as hard to make everyone smile again!" A cry of triumph, even though his voice was breaking in two now. He hurled whatever horror he was feeling to his side, raised his fist in the air, sat up to face the sun. Papyrus. Always Papyrus. How I love him so. How I love them both.  
And how I sometimes hate reality, or whatever version of reality I had to face before. "Papyrus, there are some things that can never be fixed."  
"Yes, they can if you try hard enough."  
He scurried away. I tried to stop him because he was scurrying his way into my room, but it was too late. He'd locked himself in the closet. If only Sans were here. He could teleport right past this.  
Oh, God.  
Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.  
I'd just had my first thought of him that didn't punch me in the stomach.  
He carried the bundle out of the closet towards me, and with a few trace tears trailing down his cheeks, he told me to open it. It was the mug I had smashed earlier, smashed when his death was still fresh and the lab was being trashed. I held it as if it were a baby. I gawked at it… and without thinking, I ran my fingers over the edges. He'd spent hours putting each piece back together, hours more making it airtight. I could feel myself lightening, but I remember my breathing being more difficult than it was in a long while.  
I smiled, and I suppose that gave him permission to speak. And speak he did, speak until I felt myself almost unravel. "Forgiving someone doesn't mean that you forget what you did." My smile didn't stop, so he let the words pour out of him so quickly it was almost inhuman. "I feel like we are in no position to deny someone's apologies when we have made so many mistakes ourselves."  
I paused for a few seconds, and when I replied, all the conviction had left my voice. "But I still don't feel ready to forgive her yet."  
"Do it when you feel like it, then, but at least give her a chance."  
I welcomed the sun now. Its rays poured, and I let the warmth seep into me, seep into the mug, seep into the sun.  
And I laughed.  
Yes, I laughed… and if only the entire world could join. "How did you manage to be such a good monster?"  
It was his turn to be taken aback. "Well-" I could hear him fiddle with the same thread on his shirt he'd been fiddling with since the day we'd all gotten it from our old neighbor by the street. "Someday, we all will just be only a memory for the people that we've met. I just want that memory to be a good one."  
I chuckled, and for the first time, I felt something close to genuine. "You win. I'll give it a shot."  
"I'm so glad to hear that."  
I suppose I was a little too big for my britches, because when I tiptoed downstairs to say a few apologies of my own to Jessica, the door was locked. I waited there for a half an hour or so, drumming out a hint of research about what and when pink SOULs could be weakened, when I realized there was another soul that was weakened.  
But I didn't know it was that then.  
She sped out of the room, tossing me off to the side, sprinting towards the bathroom. After I heard the coughing in the bathroom, I rushed inside, the too-familiar sound of retching stretching all the way into the hallway. For a second, I thought it was something bad she ate, but I remembered the room's configuration to be… off. She'd put something there that shouldn't be there, shouldn't be in my life at all.  
I asked her if she needed anything, but as I expected, she didn't reply. I shivered as I walked into her room, walking towards the displaced item.  
It was the gun. That same gun. That same gun I thought was a taser, that same gun I thought would end me. It was displaced.  
Without any hesitation, I locked the door. What could she be using it for? Was there anything on here that could point to it being dismantled? My instincts skyrocketed as I felt the warning on the back.  
MAY CAUSE DAMAGE TO SOULS.  
And after nearly a minute, I put the gun back down.  
She hadn't used the gun on anyone, hadn't even planned to.  
She'd used the gun on herself.  
That night, I didn't sleep. I spent four hours, at the least, on the back porch, leaving out some food near Jessica's room and a short, almost impossible condolence for her, staring at the stars.  
The stars Sans and Alphys lived in.  
The stars that called my name.  
The stars which tried to whisper encouragement, but were blocked out all the same.


	24. Chapter 24

After all the stars faded away, I finally walked to Jessica. The food was gone, the condolence letter in the trash as I expected. She was up, sipping on her coffee, reviewing what seemed to be a hill of papers. Not quite a mountaintop yet.  
I asked her if she was able to find anything there, and she only coughed a little and shifted her papers away from me. So I walked over to her right, seeing if I could peer over her shoulder a little, and she didn't object.  
I didn't realize how intelligent- no, not intelligent, observant- she was until then. She discovered, or at least poke into, most of the things I had researched. Betty's traits, how Betty functions, what anomalies we could detect during my fight with her that we could use… but so far, no conclusions for her. I could come up with a few, but I was still shaky about those at the least, terrified of them at the optimum, and absolutely a freaking-out nutjob about them at the best. All of my theories had so far led to either multiple deaths or technology we just didn't have.  
She shuddered, and I had to pause on what to do next. Not just to look up what to do with her and the damage done to her in a pathological sense, but what to do to investigate into some further research. And that further research involved me logging onto her computer and what Papyrus calls "violating privacy."  
So I told her to eat a little more and to get some rest, and I would pick up where she'd left off on her research, which wasn't at all a lie. She nodded, half out of desperation, and hobbled off to her room. I turned off the lights for her, and she turned back, nodded at me again, before collapsing into her bed.  
And I couldn't help but smile.  
Now for the real work. I swiped her backpack from the living room, pulled out what was no doubt a computer. And not just any computer… the computer that everyone in the house had associated with "freedom" and "help".  
She'd been doing real work; I won't deny that. Ever since she was here, she'd spent the past weeks we were in hiding going onto her computer and telling the citizens all they should know. If one of Betty's attacks come, the best thing to do was to either get inside and turn off the lights and not make any noise or notify a monster. It worked, but it was also her way of apologizing, I suppose.  
I opened it, and the same program she'd use to access her files was locked. Ah, of course. I called Sophie, her being the one other person in the HSO that I could trust. Thanks to Jessica, they had been reassigned from the helish work they were doing and instead were focusing on defending the city from Betty's attacks.  
"Hello!" Sophie said with a sizeable dose of cheer. Must be nice for her to have some purpose, incredibly greater than she did before. "Haven't heard you in forever."  
Here she is, talking as if Betty didn't send out any attacks in the first place. Here she is, talking as if there's no siege. How I would've liked to do that. I had to admit that I smiled a little at that.  
"Yeah, sure is nice. Anyway… I need to ask you a favor."  
"What is it?"  
"Can you get somewhere quiet?"  
She laughed, and I bit my cheek as hard as I could as I realized she was in a warzone. Soon, I joined in her laughter.  
"I mean, I can try, Gaster, but…"  
"No, no. It's alright. It's alright."  
"Anyway, what's the favor?"  
Quiet. Quiet. I had to get somewhere quiet myself. I ducked into a room that was on the outskirts of quiet. I locked the door and fixed my gaze to a spot in the floor, hoping no one else would hear me. I felt my heart spike when I heard someone walk outside of the door, but they very quickly trotted on. I sighed loud enough to where Sophie could hear me before I began.  
"Alright. I'm going into Jessica's computer, and-"  
"Wait. Why the heck would you do that?"  
I knew I had to lie, although I never felt good about it. Besides, I told myself, this is just for research purposes. Both of ours had all but ground to a halt, and we were the ones paving the way for the siege to end, weren't we? Besides, I told myself, this was for Jessica's own good. She had to rest, or else who knows what would happen to her?  
That didn't stop the words from punching me in the stomach.  
"She asked me to do an errand for her on there, but she has a password blocking me, and-"  
"Gotcha."  
No words for about two minutes or so. For a moment, I stuttered a few "hello"s into there, the smallest of punches having its way at me when I realized I'd stuttered exactly the way Alphys would. For those two minutes, I had a small, strange part of me wondering if Sophia had been hit by one of the attacks, but the occasional sound of Sophia's voice mixing with those in the background curbed my instincts for a little while.  
The two minutes was over. "Alright, alright. I have the password. Sorry for the wait; I had to do a little digging at her office."  
"Wait… you're still at the Anti-Monster Department?"  
Now it was her turn to stutter. "Uhhhh, uhh, yeah, but, uhhh, I'm sorry, I'm really sorry, we're just teaming with the HSO to defend against the- and- and- it's just for convenience, and-"  
"It's alright. Just making sure."  
"Okay. So the password is Alina."  
"Alina?" Sounded like a good enough password. I haven't heard the word "alina" before, at least in English.  
"A as in apple, l as in lemon, i as in ice…"  
I wrote it all down as she spoke.  
"...n as in nap, a as in artichoke."  
"Artichoke?"  
"Sorry. First thing that popped to mind."  
"It's alright. So it's a, l, i, n, a, right?"  
"Right."  
"Alright, thank you. Also, one more thing."  
"Yes?"  
"Why 'Alina'?"  
"I dunno. Don't ask me. Never heard of an 'Alina'. If she wants her password that way, then I say let it be that way."  
"Thank you again."  
"No problem."  
As I left the room, something popped out at me, although I didn't quite know what it was until I'd logged onto her computer, wishing we had the resources to go out for a grocery run, out of all things, and accessed the first file directory to where I wanted to go.  
It was the telescope.  
It had been in the corner of the room, peeping out right out of the window.  
It was the telescope.  
It was the telescope, sitting there, all proud, smiling.  
It was the telescope.  
I'd just been in Sans' room.  
I had to push my hands against my temporal bones for a fourth of a minute to make the room stopped spinning.  
Once I was finished, and the world zoomed back into focus again, I focused on typing in the word. Alina. What a strange, strange word in a strange, strange world.  
One look at the files and I knew I was in for a doozy. Hundreds and hundreds of scrolls down with the mousewheel only led to about half the page for a single hour, unfolding into years. Even if I could narrow it down to a few weeks, it would take me a few weeks to comb through even those video files, and then more would be stacked on top of them.  
I did contemplate where the locations were, and I found that out of hundreds, none of them seemed to involve the AMD's camera room and the nullifier room. I almost let a tear shoot right out of my throat and into my eyes. Two young lives. No pieces of evidence.  
Then I realized it had been staring me right in the face as much as I was staring at it.  
The inbox.  
I race through it- there were only about twenty to go through- sent by someone named Ronan Cass. After a few instinctual lookups, I found he was the chief of the HSO military defense from Pacenienco, a nearby district.  
All of them were either security statuses or the minority, and the minority was something… very, very interesting. There were two clips taken at the border. The first, and the oldest, was of all of us leaving the mountain and barreling down to the city, not knowing, not caring what we'd get ourselves into. The second was… was something I can't describe, and something Ronan only introduced with, "I have no idea what this is, and neither do any of my men. We think it's something you had in your old vial you called 'HATE', but this is just something else."  
It was a view of our mountain, all old and abandoned, until something covers it up like a blanket. Ink. No, not ink, I swear. It was sentient. It was moving on its own. Hel, I could almost see a hand stretch out…  
Do scientists think it's okay to kill people in comas?  
I stopped my thoughts almost as fast as I stopped the car when he'd first asked me that question. I closed the computer lid, not thinking once about logging out, and walked to my desk, hoping against hope that the thought would stop.  
Do scientists think it's okay to kill people in comas?  
No. No, I have to think. I have to think about-  
Do scientists think it's okay to-  
Stop!  
Stop. Stop. Please. Stop.  
Focus. I have to focus. I have to rearrange my paperwork, I have to write my thesis, write my silly little essay on what I think this thing is, I have to tell everyone else about this, I have to find the paper burrowed at the bottom, the very bottom.  
By the time I'm finished with all of that, it's past evening, and Jessica finally wakes up from her nap, looking not quite bright-eyed and bushy tailed, but at least a little rejuvenated.  
But it's not Jessica that I'm worried about, at least this time.  
I ran up the stairs. Yes, I ran up the stairs. Toriel, who had been struggling all of this time to comfort Asriel, asked if I was alright, and I yelled down that I was. I raced towards Papyrus' room and showed the paper to him. A paper that had been ratified before all of this happened, all of the attacks, everything in this seige.  
He'd been accepted to one of the colleges.


	25. Chapter 25

He and I were both laughing at it. Now, I know what you're thinking: how could you possibly laugh at a college degree? And I'll tell you now, student loans are nothing to laugh at, even if you are a human.  
But that's the thing: Papyrus isn't human.  
He isn't human. I'm not human, either. And until Jessica came into our lies, that was the only thing that mattered. Even if he were a human, he wouldn't be accepted to a college this young. It doesn't happen. But for him, it did. He did it without my permission, and there was no scholarship involved, but he was still accepted, chosen by the public school system. Chosen for a future year, another time far away, but still chosen. After an assessment all of the monsters took after they had come out of the mountain, he was chosen as "exceptionally observant" when given a puzzle. One thing led to another, and boom. The college accepted him, chose him for a degree in law enforcement.  
We continued laughing at it, but it was more out of excitement, pure, unadulterated, logical excitement, more than it was about humor. The house's walls seemed to laugh with us, and I could have sworn the yellow on the wall turned from faded to its regular daisy hue for a split second. As soon as I told Papyrus he'd been accepted- it felt better for the words to come running out of my mouth, and not just on a sheet of paper- he jumped, he spun, he flapped, he flew, he did all sorts of those wonderful verbs that the doctor who'd officially diagnosed him told me about.  
Of course, that meant he had to tell everyone in the house about his degree. He started with Undyne, whose eyes lit up. She even rose up from the bed, pumped out an "ALRIGHT!", and fist bumped Papyrus, after which I gave her a painkiller and a somewhat cheerful warning about overexertion in her condition and such.  
He told Jessica next, who smiled at him with a sort of look I'd never get from her, even later. It was never that genuine, never that benevolent.  
He told the Dreemurr family next, and Asriel peeped out of a shell he seemed to be in. Him and Chara seemed to be very busy and very, very concerned about something, but when I came up to Chara and asked him what it was, he just said I'd be bored by it before returning to his little family circle.  
Afterwards, Papyrus curled up in his favorite nook in the dining room and started to perform trick after trick, slide after slide on his Rubik's cube. When I asked him what on earth he was doing, he said it was "to practice for the college! I need to perfect my observational skills!"  
So having nothing better to do, my research having ground to a halt at least for now, I went and grabbed Sans' Rubik's cube (thank God it was unopened; otherwise, I would have given up on the whole thing) and just tousled around with it. Nothing else. Nothing else. It was beautiful boredom. It was insanity, but only temporary. Only for a few minutes, and I swore I'd get right back to my work. But it didn't matter then. Then, it was just him and I. We were together again. We were bonding again. Hel, we were a family again. And that was all there was to it.  
After about five or so minutes, my brain having concocted three ways to make the tiles spin around in just the right places, I heard a creaking behind me and knew that Papyrus had gotten out of his chair. No matter. This right here, this right in front of me, would occupy me for at least the next ten minutes. I noticed I was pushing my promise to get up and get to working later and later, but now I made a double-dog-dare for me to come back to my work after these ten minutes.  
That was at least until the smell came.  
It was wonderful. It was perfuming right out of the kitchen, warming and lifting me up. It was a puppet. It echoed back to me of days coming home, of him sprinting right past Sans and right onto me, giggling, nearly screaming, begging me if I could take a bite of what he'd spent so much time trying to cook for me. Back to days of holding onto his shoulders, of leaning over the stove, of teaching him concepts of kinetic molecular theory while the water boiled and bubbled. Back to days of him ignoring me, sprinkling in the perfect amount of salt, opening just enough pepper to make me sneeze what he called a "big ol' Dad sneeze" before he pinched a tad amount of pepper in the pot. Back to all of the sacred days before.  
And by the time I came to the kitchen, Rubik's cube aside, the spaghetti was half-cooked, nearly everyone running down the stairs and crowding around.  
It was a joyous explosion, as contagious as it could get. Mellowed, yes, but still contagious as ever. Did we hear sirens? Yes, we heard sirens. Did we hear screaming? Yes, although that could have just been the sirens. Did we hear the unmistakable thuds of explosions? Yes, we heard those. But our own explosion was more powerful than those for now. We laughed, told jokes, as quiet as it was. I taught spectroscopy to anyone who would listen, and Asgore was the first one to sit on the couch in front of me. Toriel whispered something into his ear that seemed to concern him, but I didn't quite catch it.  
Undyne was out of her bed, but that didn't seem to matter now. Nothing about overexertion seemed to stop her. Even Jessica had tottered her little way out of her little room.  
But there was something wrong.  
It was my house. I had bought it, taken care of it from the start, explored every nook and cranny of it. I knew what it felt like for someone to take up a certain amount of space, what it felt like for them to be gone. It was nauseating. And I had to find out what it was, to restore the explosion we had before.  
I walked around the kitchen. I walked around the living room. I even walked upstairs and looked around in my bedroom. I even went in, looked around the closet in an aimless sort of way, completely ignoring the steps trotting down behind me. I considered the attic, but I'd locked that door. So never mind that.  
I went back down the stairs, and there was only one thing, one thing that caught my eyes off guard, made me flinch. And since the fight with Betty, I hadn't flinched over the past few days.  
The door stop was pushed towards the wall.  
Someone had opened the door.  
And Chara sat in his seat, dumbfounded, only half of the locket in his hand when it was full this morning. Where Asriel sat was empty, and Toriel sat in her place, a mix of horror and pride spreading across her face as a small crowd gathered to watch Asriel run off to who knows where. The Dreemurr family dismissed it as a quick errand he was running, and that he would be back in the next half hour. It took a half a minute for everyone to go back to business.  
I asked Toriel and Asgore where Asriel had gone, but they were quick to repeat that he was only running an errand. We'd run out of food. Toriel piped up about the spaghetti, repeating how it was one of the last things in the pantry. I knew I couldn't believe them, and they knew I didn't. But there was something about that moment, something that made me want to hang on. Something-  
My eye.  
It started to burn.  
No images flashed through me this time.  
Only a feeling of peace, very brief.  
Then the terror came.  
Then it started to hurt.  
Then Papyrus' spoon dropped to the floor.  
I ran to Papyrus, and soon we were both retching over the trashcan with pain.  
This had only happened to us once before, and when it did, this was when everything started.  
And then I saw him.  
He was there.  
He was alive.  
The same as in my dreams.  
Inside the water, trapped inside broken glass.  
Except the glass was seeping, and black ink was filtering into the other side.  
He was there.  
I asked Papyrus what he was seeing, and he told me the same thing, heaving out the words. So we were sharing this now. What if we'd shared it before? Poor Papyrus… poor Papyrus…  
And dam it, if there was a fathering instinct, if I ever had a fathering instinct in my life, it was there. It was there, more loud and shining, shouting louder than ever. It was there, and there was no denying it. And as Chara ran outside the door to follow Asriel, to "make sure he didn't get killed out there", we had a very pernicious choice to make. And my instinct, the instinct that Papyrus and I shared in our eye, told us to follow him. To follow him to our last breath.  
And Papyrus was the first one to step out onto the snow.  
Sprinting.


	26. Chapter 26

He's breathing. He's breathing.  
It's crackled. It's a broken, battered whistle. It's everything I've worked for, everything now tarnished.  
But he's breathing. He's breathing.  
When we first followed Chara, wondering where Asriel went, we skipped past the grocery store. We came to a cliff, Asgore bumbling along behind us. There, I saw him.  
It wasn't him anymore.  
It wasn't my oldest son anymore.  
It was someone else. Something corrupted with HATE. Instead of the blue that had first popped open in his eyes when he was born, it was black. It was horrible. It was turgid. It was nothing, and that was the most horrible, the most turgid part of it.  
I saw Betty. She was lurking to the side, laughing as she stabbed Asriel. I tried to move, but with a stretch of her hand, my son stretched out his own hand, and I couldn't move. I was surrounded by blue. And as she took what was left of Asriel's SOUL, Chara was silent. Chara was still. Chara was shaking. At least for the moment before he charged towards Betty.  
But Papyrus wasn't silent. Papyrus wasn't silent at all. He was screaming, screaming for Sans to come back, to remember that he was his brother, that he was his brother, that he was his brother. As Betty stretched out of her hand, Sans did the same, and Papyrus was flung against the cliff.  
He pressed his shoulder gingerly, shuddering.  
He tried again. He yelled.  
"You're my brother."  
The words came choked, and what I would have given to help him in that moment would take up more than any piece of paper, any combination of letters could tell.  
"I won't attack."  
Sans wrenched his hand down, and the tiniest, yet most painful of cracks throbbed on Papyrus' skull. I screamed, but the barrier around me kept the scream paralyzed inside it so it echoed in my ears, back and forth, and in a minute, I couldn't hear anything.  
Nothing but the explosion that rang out when my son broke out of his HATE.  
I was let out of the barrier. In the distance, I could hear the clang of Chara's metal against Betty's, the vain grabbing of Asgore's fingers at my coat. But that couldn't stop me. I ran, and there was nothing that could stop me. The only thing that separated my son and I was distance now; we were of one heart, one mind, it seemed. He was alright. And that kept me at a certain uneasy peace, the same peace that he certainly had.  
He was breathing.  
He was breathing.  
I held him closer, put my head gently, gently, against his chest. I could hear it better now. It would have been lulling had I not been a scientist, but because I was, it was a little lulling instead. He was my son. He is my son.  
He was breathing.  
And that was all that mattered.


	27. Chapter 27

Part 3: There Again


	28. Chapter 28

My eyes could barely take in the sight. The tears were almost ripped from my eyes and onto the ground, but reason told me not to. One must not cry in a warzone.  
He couldn't be there. That could not be that same shorts, the sneakers, even the blue jacket I'd urged him to put on. I'd looked at the weather later, and it was pleasant… too pleasant to warrant a jacket such as that. Maybe it wasn't the chill of the day I was preparing him for, but the Bety's own chill, permanent and betraying…  
The cloud came back this time. It was much smaller now, although it could never even dream of being palatable. It came back, and although it didn't quite envelop me, it took me into its arms just as long and just as much as I held my son in mine. Even when I stopped holding him, as I had to after a few minutes no matter what I felt or what I didn't feel, the cloud still held me just as tightly.  
Time passed by, although I didn't quite know how much until I saw the sunlight hovering into a crack that it hadn't before. Time was drifting, time was passing by, time was moving on, but I didn't. I felt it, but it was obscure, something buried outside of what I was drifting in. Yet something all too real.  
How was I supposed to die?  
Here I was, nothing more than a heap on the cliff ground. He's breathing. He's breathing.  
What type of father was I?  
What type of father could I become?  
I felt Papyrus tap my shoulder, but it was more of a thud than it was a pat to my ears. He couldn't dare to do anything farther, and neither could I.  
So I carried him. How I carried him.  
Asgore confessed that Toriel was too terrified to come to the cliff, but that she should be here in a few minutes. A thread of Asriel's shirt drifted, caught in the wind, lingering on my son's coat for a few moments before flying off. Asgore let a tear slip onto his chin, and the slightest hint of guilt came towards me, the smallest part of me haunting me, telling me that I shouldn't be holding the bundle in my arms.  
Papyrus asked for a chance to hold him, although by no means in the same gollygosh way that Sans must have asked to hold Papyrus when he was born. I was hesitant-moving him could worsen any injuries he already had. But the broken whistling that was his breathing- still his breathing- was persistent, and so I handed him to Papyrus.  
Chara was silent.  
Still, we tried to use healing magic. While I could diagnose any pathological ailment, and his temporary unconsciousness was most definitely due to the exhaustion of the fight, I was less sage when it came to magical medicine. Alphys was, but Undyne was now trying to reduce her to a subject she insisted people try to avoid. Toriel was, having shared Inter-SOUL Medicine courses with Alphys and I in the university. She'd always tried to it was part of her requirements to be betrothed. Tried to.  
Toriel came. Asgore whispered the news in her ear, and she cried, she cried, she cried, and if Papyrus minded, he didn't say anything, and if Sans heard, he didn't say anything. Soon, the entire cliff turned into a cave of tears. Everything that wasn't said by Toriel was said by the cliffs, seeming to wail along with her. But I knew it was only an echo. Only a soundwave bouncing out of her throat, into one cliff, into the other, and back again. I knew it was only logical. I knew everything could, everything would be explained through something, and this, all this… it defied logic.  
I looked at my son in Papyrus' arms, his eyebags lengthening.  
He defied all logic.  
Papyrus did, too. His stoicism, or at least his kindness, or if not, both.  
Defying logic was something I couldn't quite comprehend, something I couldn't put my finger on. So I drifted back into my cloud, enveloping myself into the one thing it provided: oblivion. Oblivion from what was happening around me, oblivion from the need to say something, oblivion from the sun in the cliffs, oblivion from an every-minute-or-so dripping that I prayed to God wasn't my son's blood.  
Papyrus stood there, holding what he'd lost. With every breeze that seemed to blow by, I could hear a gasp, although I didn't know who it was coming from. All of our breath could be stolen for now; no one was dead. And I vowed no one would become that way either.  
After what seemed to be an hour, my watch having been forgotten on my bedside table, Chara began to talk to the rest of us on what to do. Battle strategies. Battle strategies! Just after a battle? The cloud was still seeping a little into my thoughts, so I tried my best to fight it, to comb through the cobwebs it had weaved in my head. To my surprise, Papyrus and I voiced what could have been a few comprehensible words. Eventually, Frisk came to the conclusion that LOVE would be the only thing to neutralize the HATE that had put our entire family into a stranglehold, but he wasn't quite sure when or how to neutralize it.  
Toriel approached Sans, and there was no concern on my face until something seemed to add to her tears. I didn't ask her what was wrong. And a part of me didn't want to know, didn't want to even think that there was something wrong. That my son had been plucked out from death's reach, and the hand still couldn't reach him in any way.  
I didn't ask why we took the long way home. I only noticed that there was a mockingjay on our neighbor's roof, laughing at me.  
But when I went inside, there was no laughing that came from Jessica, not even a smile when she saw the bundle in my son's arms. Only pain; she had suffered an injury to the stomach, and from the looks of it, Undyne had finally let herself cry. This had only happened once, and when it happened, the light never quite went back into her eyes. Undyne had done something that she had regretted.  
I still don't know what happened to Jessica, even know as I write. She won't tell me. She turns her head a bit away from me and says it's too painful to talk about. Undyne won't tell me either. She turns her head a bit away from me, says the same thing. I ask her if she got hurt either, and she says no, she was hurt in a different way. Something she thought an old scientist like me would never be able to understand. And perhaps she's right.  
I wanted to console the Dreemurr family. They were hurting more than ever, and hurting with a type of agony I'll never be able to understand. To lose a son, yes, but to lose a brother, to lose a friend… that I'll never be able to understand. So many things I won't be able to understand as a scientist.  
Once I was home, I went and laid him in his bed. That room I had ignored. Would he be able to walk again? No. I had to think beyond that if I was any type of father. Would he be able to ask me why his Rubik's cube was opened? Would he pick up his trombone again, maybe try a few notes if the air wasn't too tight…  
I could feel a sudden fullness now. A fullness that I couldn't handle, and a fullness that I have never been fully able to reconcile. Back to work, back to work…  
As I was running a bone density test, not noticing that Papyrus was there until I heard him jump when I turned around, I didn't realize that something was wrong with him until the test was over.  
He wasn't asleep.  
I didn't dream of hitting him, didn't dream of shouting to see if he was responsive. But there was still something very, very unscientific boiling up inside of me, something more primal than I could care to tell. It had been only a few hours since we were at the cliff, but there was something in the way his eyebags sunk more than they usually did, the way his body seemed to be too small for the covers.  
I went back. I didn't want to go back, but I went back to something that he said. Wracking through my brain. Swirling through, over and over again. Crashing through every neuron, ripping apart every strand of myelin. Sending dread spiraling almost down to the bottom of my back, and then shooting its way to the top again.  
He was in a coma.


	29. Chapter 29

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INITIALIZING...br /WHENRUN: TERMINATE GAMECODEbr /WHENRUN: TERMINATE SAVE_BUTTONbr /WHENRUN: REPLACE F4R1IS2K WITH CHARAbr /RESTARTING...br /RESTARTING...br /PROCEED AS NORMALbr / ̴̞̤͚̳̱̬̦͚̪̳̤̭̖̻̹̺̤̂ͮͧͨͬ͢ ̧̟̯̣̬̯̠̻̖̬̠͚̈ͥ̆͒̿̋̚̕͟ ̀͗̄͗̆͂̈ͧͣ͑͗ͮ̌̔̏̔̎͏̨̯̤͙̞̰̗̙͔̩̯̯̜̮̦̮̰͜ ͭ̅́͗ͩ̓̚̚͘͏͍̞̫̯̦͇͖̲̬̬͟͟ ̸̢̛̣͓̙͕̞̟̘͕̭̗͍ͮ̊̌̓ͪ̿ͪ̎̍ͬ̇͜✋̂͗̾̎̎͂͛͆͐ͨ͊͋̇ͯͯͫ̈ͨ̂͏͙͙̪̱̰̪̟͓͍͝͞ ̝̣̮̪̮͖͈̱͎̖̹̟̒̃̓̏̊̅̍̀̌̉̀̈̉ͪ̅ͦ̄̕ ̸̢̧̝͉̱̟͕ͮ̀ͥ̑ͮ ̵̛͖̗̣̠̖͉̤̩̙̩̖̬͉̘͔̝̼̟͗̔̔́̽̓͌ͭ̓̃ͧ̎͊ͦ͛͛ ͆͋̄̽͊̚͞҉̢̡͉͇̟̦͕̮͙̘̯͇͖̼̳̘̻̭ ̵̛̱̰͍͔̣̩̟̰̦͈͈̜̙̲͖͙͔ͦ͐̌́ͮ̓͑̅ͮ̓̅̀͝✋̢̽ͪ͗̄ͨͬͯ́ͫ͊ͧ͆͆̏͂͐̿̂̑͘͞҉̵̫̮̫͓̲͇͓̦̫ ̶͖̭͇̣̙̫̣̖̼̞̺͓͓̜̦̲̭̮͍̃͛ͤ̇́ͯ̇̿̎ͫ͂̒̔̈́͐͜͟ ̵̐ͥ̉͂ͨͭ͆ͫͨ͑ͭ̾̃̒͝҉̨͓̦̪̺̗̩͈̘̲̥ ̨̫̮̳̹͙̙̝͓̝ͥ̾͑̎̆͛ͤ̈́̎͆̍͐ͫ̊͋̾̚̕ͅ ̀ͬ̐̈ͣ̀̿̓͝͏̼̙̜̦̼̗͔̻͓̫̭̝̞̗͓br /̷̨̉̽ͫ̀͂̓҉͔̻̗̮͉̮̘͚͉̣ ̴̨̡̝̺͚̮͖̹͚̂̊ͤ̉͘ ̱͚̫͇͕̮̺ͩ̒ͤ̑ͨ̽ͤ̐̒̂̇ͦͭͣ͋ͩ͘͜͞͞ ̡̧͙̼̤̖͓̬̣͉̲͙͖̼̖̣̞̃̒ͭͤͣ͐͘͢͞ͅͅ✌̳͔͕̺̬̠̺͓̘͎̻̥̘̇̆̀̂̈̉͛̾ͧ̐̆ͬ͆ͭ̎̚͜͝❄̧͎̞̪͕͍̭̳̻͔̖̲̤̀͛͋ͧ̓ͨͅ ̡̧̛̰̪̞̖̮̖̹̙̬̮͔͖̤͔̰̆ͭ͆͆ͬ̿̊ͩ̑ͧ̆̏́̄ͪ͗̀͞ ͋̉ͦ̍҉̵̲͓̩͙̳͈͕͈̲̲̻͍̹̙̫͔͢ͅ ̵̵̢͍̺̪͓͈̯̯̠͙̳͈̟̘̫̙̬̩͉̯̈ͧ̊̍̆ͯ̎̑ͨ̎ͮ̂͆͗̎ ̵͍̘̮͖̲̟͕̣̤̫̲̳̑̏̔ ̸̡̙̦͚̥̝̰̬͔̦ͭ͑ͩ͂ͩ̀̔͌̍ͩ̓͒̓̍͑ͅ ̴̵̩̜̠̗̥͔͓̯̭̞͓͉̽͐͑ͧ͊͌̔ͩ͗̍̋̃̓͝͝ͅͅͅ ̷̧̛̒͆ͤ͑̑̓ͪͦͮ͊̆́̐͞҉̭̼̙͕͕̺͇͔̤̹͈̪̮̻̩͔̲͍̳✋̶̨̼̱̖̱͕̮̹̠̰͙̮͍̻͍̻̼̾ͭͨͯ̇̈̑ͬ͆̓͟ͅ ̴̨̣͈̰̳̩̠̹̤͍̬͍͍̜̤͓̯ͮ̾ͮ̍̓ͭͯͦͩͫ ̛͈̺̟͍̉ͬ̀͊ͥ͢ ̴̛̞͕͎̹͚̼͙̍͒̐͌ͤ̈́̏ͧ̆ͨ͋͑̽ͦ̋̒ͅ❄̛̾̉ͤ̌ͤ̒ͪ̑̏̀͑ͫ͊̃̆͋͐̏͘҉̛͓̟̰̗̼̪̙͈̰͝ ̵̧̟̖͓͙̳̤̦̞̱͕͎̍͗̎ͣ̿ͫ̇̾̂͂̎ͥ̽́ͤ͐̅͛̓ ̶͓̠̟̬̲̩̲̣̙̬̌͒ͭ̔͌ͦ͒̋ͦ̍̓̎̌̓͟͞ ͦͫ̍̈́͛ͥͨ͛̆̓ͮ̋̊ͧ́͐͊͒͏̧̝͙̥̰͎̝̖͇̰̠͈̜̤̺͖͔̞̼ ̜̗͎͈̯̙͈͚͖̟̭̞͌̅̂̽̊ͭͧͣ̈͊̓̀ͭͮ͒͞ ̢̞̰̪̜̜͓ͨ̆ͣ̅͂̆̋̀͌̋ͫ́ͩ̃̕͟ͅ❄̷̨̢̧̙̱̞͙͕͙̪͙̙͇͕̥̥ͭ̃̈̽ͨͨ̋ͩ̄̉ͮ̌̌͜ ̨̢̧̣̤͓̘̦̗̹͍̬̗̯̹̱͓̅͐̈ͦ̄ͮͥͧ̽ͧ̿͋̅̓̕͝ͅͅ ̴̬̭͉͎̜̠̘̟͈͈͚̗̓ͩ͗̓ͣ͌ͬ̆ͬ͞ ̴͙͕͔̘͉̠͙̥̯͕͚̿͑ͧ̓̅ͬ̓͌̌̈͘̕͡ͅ ̈̀̅̊̽͋̅ͭ̀ͫͦ̕͠͏͍̝̪̝̫̞͓̰̥̠͕✌̩̖͔̪͈̘͎͚̟̯̻̥̤̩̱͙̎ͦ̑ͪͭ̀̍͆̄ͯ̋ͯ̚͟ͅ✡̝̞̭͔̯̹͍͚͈̑ͩͦ̾̍͂͌ͦͩ̒ͦ̎̍̀̃̒̽̆̃͡✍̼͇̱̠͈̮͖̞̭̯͈̠̱̻̟̀͊ͣͭ̋ͩ̿ͣ͡br /̨͈̻̦̺͎̲̟̰̝̹͍̪ͮ̈̀̆ͭ͆̽ͪͯͣ̇̄̕͜͠ͅ❄̸̵̭͖̭͚̳̖̯̯͈̭̀͐̈̅̄͋̽̀ͨ͂̽̿̓̄͐́̈̈́̚͘͟ ̡̯͔̼̥̗̞̻̮̤̭̞̣̣̽̋̅̉̅ͨ͟✋̧̨̡͖̝͙̤̗̠̪̖͕̙̓͑ͦͤ̋͗̐͊̾͟ ̴̨̡̘͔̝͕͍͈̦͊̿ͣ͐̂͐̃ͩ̈̍́̓̏̃͛̕͟ ̷̨͒͗͆ͮ̿̇̂̅́͗̒̈́̉̃҉̦̜̗̼̭̱̮̼̦̙̜̰ ͔̦̱̯̈́̏ͭ̉͜͜͞ ̶̶ͬ̐̓̓͆ͫ̒̓̚̕͏̥̘͖̩͖̠̮͖̤͚͈̝͇̭̞̹͔ ̄̃̽͋̑̉̃͆ͯ̊̂҉̡͈̥̪̼̕❄̸̛̟̜͙͈͎̩̤͙̣̤̲̞͇͈͍͗ͦ̇̋͝ͅ✋̷̧̙͓͍̬̜̣̑̇̋̂ͯͤ ̳̮̮͕͙̝̅̋ͫ̄̍ͦ́ͤ̈́ͣ̆̆̅ͭ̕͢ͅ ̵͚̪͙̀͌ͯ̈ ̧̡̠͍̣̬̫͇͗ͬ̉ͪͥͥ̃͂͛̕ ̧̤̞̤̰̹̰͙̣̞̹͙͔͖̀̀͆̔̑ͣ̅ͪͩ͛̏̑ͨ̑̾ͨ̓ͅ✠̷̩̤͖͓̤͙̝̦̥̭̘̭̗ͫ͗̌̈ͯ̆̏͛͌̂̇̈́̆̅̽ͯ̾̕ͅ ͣ̏ͬ̏̎̏̿ͩ̑҉̵̛̦̪͎̱̯̭͟͞ ̷̡̬̞͖̠̙̟͎̲̻̻̰̳̜̘ͪ̈ͤͪ̈̋ͧ͑̽̌͢͞͞ ̶̧̋̾ͩͧ̉͗͂͗ͥ̃̅ͨͫͧ̾̚͞͏͚̯̩̯͈̱͢ ̵͎̗̠͖͕̣̪̭̩͕̰ͤ̋̉ͭ̇̓̓̔̃̆̊̆̏̉̑͒̎͞✋̶̡̤͇̭̱̻͈̠͓͕̹̮̼̥̊͒̉̒͋̈̌ͯ̇̾ͫ͒̓̀͒̈́̚͘ͅ ̠̬̻͔͚̰̠̲͖̳̟͓̪̰̭̗̟̈̋́͒́̐̏̀̐̋̐ͭͭͤ̃͟͟͞ ̴̠̜̰̲̰̝̭̞̲̦̖̦̯̫̭̱̲̓͛ͪ̆̈͟ ̛͇̣̮͖̻̤̱͕̥ͦͯ̐̂ͭ͆̿͟ ̶̧̨̛͕̥͈̮͍͉͋ͣ͌ͨ͌͑͗̆̓ͧ̎ͮ̓̌ͅ✋̸̨͚̣̲̩͖̩̫̰̝̱͛̏̄ͨ̉͆ͭ̈́̊͌̆͌̅̄͌̀͡ ̓ͮ̅̃ͬ̓ͣ̇̀̀̔̆ͥ̚͏̴͍̦̣̭͔͕̝͢͠ ̸̢̦͖̯̼̆ͨͦ̎̔̏̇͗̈̾ͬ̄͆̋͋̚͢ ̧̧̙̺̞͖̲̺̤̭͓̙ͩ̉͛̄͘͢͢ ̧̜̩̺̘̮̗̣͕͕̬̲̦̙̦̱͓ͥ̆ͧͨ̏̔͛́̃̎̿̾ͫ̉ͭ̈̕ ̡̩͚͙̠̮͇̦̘͕͇̫̹̽̅ͭ̎ͮ͑̈ͣͯ̌̈́͜͜͝ ̶͚̯̞͇̺͙̘̥̪̣̝̹̬̍̓ͨ͑̐͆͘͟͞❄͓͎̖̭̼̜̲̩̤̩̄͌̏ͭ͊ͨ̾́̏͜✋͍͍̥̫̥̻͕͎̼̞̬̺͕̝̺͓̪̺ͦͭ̑ͨ͂ͯ̍ͤ̔̌̃̚͜͝ͅ ̸̡̙͔̺̪̉͗̇ͭ̽̒ͨ̈́ͨͮͮ͋ͫ̓̈ͮ͘͜ ͤͫͩ͂ͥ̉̊͌̓͞͏̹͔͈͓̗͔͕̝̹̯͎̱̤͙̺͔̗ͅ ̵̧͈͖̟͚̻̲̹̫̦͇̭͕̬̙̜̲̈̔ͫ͂ͧͤͮ̂̾ͤ̆̅̋̚͜͞ͅ ̸̴͙̲͙̰̞̥͉͕̜̬̌̊ͩͤͬ̌͆̊̔̚͟br /̭̰̜̗̓̏̂̀́̕❄̵̍̔̽ͩͬ͂ͣ̉̉̋͋̽ͭ̇ͮ̅ͩ̇ͭ͜͢͡҉̝̤̹͉͍̜͖̥̭̫ ̇̊ͯ̓̆ͯ͂ͩ̽̒͌ͧͯͯ̔͡͡҉̟͎̙̬̖̩͕͖̰͟ ̛̱̥͎̜̺̾ͮ͗̈͠ ͨ̈́̇̉̊̉̋̃͋̆ͩͧͫ͋͆̚͏̢̛̘̥͍̪̯̟̦͎͙͇̯̞̺͇͖͈ͅ ̶̸̥̜͓̺̻̮͚̤̥͖̜̭ͯͬ̾͋͘͜ ̛͉͔͖̩͔̙͈͚͋̐ͨ͛̔͝͝ͅͅ✋̡̝̘͙̠̳͕͇̩̹̯͍̻̘͎̤͊͑͆̂̀ͩ̏̍̿͝͝͡ͅ ̶̡̩̜̖̱͎̗̱̬̱̗̩̥͎̹̙̫͎̭ͫͯ̌ͫͧͪ̉͂̓͊̿ͪͬͥ̉ͯ͢͟ ̵̵̺̘̞̻̥͇͕̮̙̫͉̯͖̾̒ͬͮͭ̌͛͆͑͗̃͑̿ͪͫ͊͗̇ ͦ̐̓͋̒͛̓̚͏̜̘͈̜͔͙͈͉̱̠̗̮̯̪̪͖ ̶̸̀̃̋͌͋̇̎̊̾̂̇̂̑ͨ́ͪ̐̚͏͍͚̭̱͓̬̞̲̹̫̦͙͓͇̣͘ ̶̷̡̅͗̌̈ͥ͗̌͛̇̃̓ͥ̎̾ͥ̚͏̤̗̙̩̻̘ ̷̡̗͈͍̟͙̘̻͉͈̱͌̔̎͋̔ͧ̀̾̚͜͞ͅ ̨̢̳̭͓͔̬͚͙͐́̈́̒̅ͮ̈́̀̅ͪ̄̽̒ͤ̅̂̊ ̸̨̞̥̙͖͓͓̳̖́ͩ̂ͣͨ̎͝ ̭̺͙̟͈̀̏ͣ͊̑͊͑̿̽ͦ͑ͦͨ✋̂ͨ̌̑ͫ̊͐ͬ̑ͧ̐͆ͫ͏̶̷̢̛̱̯̮̼̦͎̤̥ͅ ͙̣̩͖͖̯̜̟̣͖͇̤̝̾ͨͧ͋̄͊ͬ͌̔ͣ͊̍͒̃͋̄̚͟ͅ❄͔͔̗̤͎̠̘̰̼̝̩̩̣͕̓̄͋̒ͩͨ̚͜͜͞͞ ̢̖͈̝͙͕̟̪͓̤̱͕͉̰̱̫̠̪̲̓̊̏ͧͭ͒ͫ͟❄̨̗̯̼̙̙̺͍̣̞̮̘̬̭̃̓̍̽̽ͮ̇ͨ̄̍̀̔̍̂̀͟ͅ ̛͙̗̪̜͕̬͎͕͋͋́ͧͧͫ̃̋̐̓̽́͛̽̃͞ ̛̼̘͚̯͎͌͆ͣ͋ͪͩͯ̎̆͂̒͐ͩ̕͞ ̶̨̡̧̩͚̱͔̘̯͇̤̩̙͈̪͖̪̱͖̮̹́̔̽̚ͅ ̴̡̥͖̣̘̺͉̟̘̯͕̭̞̲͖̪̑̉͐͛̆̃ͬ͟ ̵̨̤͖̻͍̦̎ͪ̾ͨ̒̎͗̂̌̉̈́ ̒͂̈́͂̒͑ͤ͂͞͏̷̫̺̤͖̥̳͕̳̠̯͜͝ ͍͍͎̭̰̲͇͈͙͙̱̆̉̅̑́͌ͭͩ̆͋ͥ͗͐ ̵̨̢͍̱͎̪̰͔͕̻̫̟̯̰ͫ͑ͣͣͦ̈́̐̿̽͘ ͐ͩ̎̏҉̪̹̹̮͙͎̫̱̫̭͓͡ͅ ̸̡̝̰̮̪̪̼̯̉͌ͧ̑ͩ̌͆̌ͬ̉͘͢͞ͅbr /̵̵̨̨̝̻̮͔ͣ̑͒ͮ̉̾̒͗̎͟❄̶͈͍͎͖̣͔̥̩̲̟̺̗̲͑͋͌̃ͥ̚ ͦͩ͑ͥ͆̎͌ͩͦ̌ͭ̔ͧ̏ͧ̏̈́͗͏̯̖̖͉͓̩̣͖̬̩͍͢͡ ̡̛̛͈͙̲͉͚̯͇̼ͧ̾ͬ́̈͛̅̑͘ ̝̹̘͇̺̓̍̈́̏̈́̈́͢͠ ̴̢͕͉̱̠̘̲̱̖̼ͯ̍̏̍̇̈́̒ͦ̾̋͛ͣͬ̄̄̄͝ ̷̴̨͖̳̠̫̳̮͓̌ͥͨ̆̀ͮ̃͌ͭ͌͂ͦ̌✋ͫͤ́͗̂ͫ͐̎̈́͒ͪͦ̄҉̞̩͇͕̳͉͖̬͉̲̻̕ ̶̴̤̲͉̯̖̜̜̳̘̪̣̲͎͇̝̯̇̋͐̍̂̄̎͒̒ͥ̐ͧ̌ͯ̚ ̴̧̣͍̻͙̗̲̺̘͑̋͊̐ͅ ̴̨̞͉̠̠̟̫͚̟̖͖͙̜͕̺̝̗͍̪͐͛ͯ̏̊̈́̉͠ ̷̣͍͉͉̲͓͇̘̻̗͇̤̟͔͛̑ͥͥ̾̂͗̐̎̆̾̏͛̽͝ ̛̈́͑̇̆̓ͨͯ̄͏̷̨͔̖̞̝̗̘̞̞̺ ̸̡̨̥͎̙͙͈̝̬̤͚̥̖̗̬͈͚̙̑ͪͯ̾ͥͪͬ̌̍ͤ̂̆͒̿̋̕͢ͅͅ ̴̼͕͍̘̠̣͕͓̖̝̠͕͚̮̟̂̓̊̀͂̓ͫͪ͛̒̓̓̈ͮ̿̌̕͢ ͩ̏̂̎ͪ͑̍͗͒͒̆ͤͭ̑ͪ͛͊͊̚͝҉̵̡͇͇̖̜̹̮ ̷̢̤̰̣͈͖̣̦̫̹͙͉̦̖̝̲̻̅̂̂͛͌͐͊͊͋͢ͅ✋̷̧͍̤̤̜̺̼͓̼̲̫̭͖̭̮̰́ͩ͋̾̀͛̈́̃͑ͫ̔̆́̅̆̍͝͝ ̶͓̝̼͈̳̜̄͑̆̌͂̀ͫ̾̚͢͝ͅ❄ͩ̽̃̂͐ͨͤ̃̓̋ͭ͜͏͍̪̞̣̞͚ ̶̷̡̖͎̞͈̰̝̺̰̪̩̤̈́̏̾͒ͨ̈́̍̉̒̔͂̊̀͊̓ͪͪ̚͡❄̛̛̩̮̩͇̘͐ͫ̋ͦͦͨͥͯ̊̊͋̒ͪ̚ͅ ̴̱̠̦̘̱̈́̏ͤ͌ ̵̢̻̫͍̦̮̙͍̣͔̱͂ͮ̅̒ͦ͗ͨͣ͂ͣͤ̏̽͆̂ ͬͨ̈͊ͤͥ̽ͣ͝͏̲̤̗̠͕̹̺ ̈̏̍̈́͐̾ͮ̈́̔̕͏͎̞̱̗̩̺̤̳̹̻̪͖̹̤͇̦͚̳✌̷̴̢̢̢̙̝̯͖̣̙͇̬̬̹͔͑͑̑ͧ͂ͥ̚ ̵̴̱̣͇̰̖͖͔̜̞̮̬̖̯͆̀͗̓ͪ̈́̾ͣ͑ͮͅ ̷̶͇̰̩̩̭͕̥̲͈͚̘͍̘͓̲͈̪̀̇̊̄ͤ͑̄͂ͩͪ̚͢͡ͅ ̴̶̣̺͍͚̦̻̅ͬͦ̌ͪ̚͜͟ͅ❄̴̱͈̥̬̖̥̗͈͔̦̓̄̊̉ͪ̉̓̄̈́̔ͪ̅̆ͣ͘̕͢͞ ͂̆̍ͯ̃͂ͨͥ͊ͪͧ̊̿͛͂҉̴̡̢̖͓̝͢ ̛̮̼̱̳̙̥͎͕̩͉̝̺̘̽̆̾̋͒͝ ̶̱͍̱̗͍̳̟̗ͬ̑̂̀ͦ̐ͨ͒́͊̕͟ ̸̺͇̱̠̩͍̜ͧ̊ͯͥ͌ ̨͕̫͖̖̥̳͌̉̊͗̌͟ͅ✠̪͎̰̜͉̯͈̀ͧ̑̅ͭ̍̎ͮͩͭ͛̕❄̢͎͇͓̱̭̰͇̻̍̍͂̐̾̽͊͒̾̐̉̐̇͘ͅ ̸̨̗͈̜͚̥͍̗͙͕̗ͩͦ̇̃ͯ̅͂̅ͮ̋͜͜͞ ͩ̄̇͒̾҉͏̫̹̠̗̝̯ ̸̳̹̜̣͈̹̱̑̆͋͆͌̒̏̊̋̋́̂͡ ̫̟̮̜̱͚̥͓̩͋̎ͥ͌ͣ͑̂̃̅̒͋̓ͤͯ͟͞͡͝✌̵͉̫͙̣̹̈́̓̏͆̈̄̇ͫ͟ ̎ͮ̄̾ͭͩ͌̅̋̆̓͐ͪ҉̡̠͍̤̥͇̮̺̗̯̤̬͉̜͙͕̘͟͞ ̔̿̒̅͒̅̽͑̓ͪ͋͊̚̚҉̶̡̗͓̦̫͉̮̳̘͞͞ͅͅ❄̡̠̯͈͉͚̟͓́̄͊͊͛̓̽̎̈ ̫̠͔̻̺͇̫̟̈̈ͮ̊̓̃̒ͩ͊̓͊͒͘̕͜͠ ̨̛̗̝̤̘͚͓̼̙̲̖̹̯͖͉̦̔̐͑͛ͣ͊͋͆͗̽̏ͫͨ͑ͮ̕͞͡ ̧ͩ̉͐̀͋̄̿̉̓̋ͧ́̂̇̅̄̄ͦ̈́͜҉͇̥̠̣̯̞ ̨̩̥̖̬̟̠̟͔̱̺̳͚̜̬͙̗͍̱ͫͩ̐ͨ̿͆͗͛̓̒̎̃ͥͅ ̛ͧͩ́ͮ҉̶̲̠̣͖͘br /̢̠̞͎̩̟̮̲͓͐͒̄͜✡̵̵̨͔̠̘̊̍ͦͫ̇͗̀̑ͦ̂͗̆͋̋̚͜ͅ ̦̘̭̪̪̤͉͙̪̤ͬ̓̈́ͮ̽ͯ͒ͪ̈́ͣͩͮ̽͂̓ͮ͊̒̔͡❄͋̓͑̅͑̆̎̐̅ͧ̄͒҉͙̪̩̙̲͉͜͝ ̢͕͎̗͔̫̳̬͖͖̝̼͚̰̼͓͇͉̦ͥ͋̊̏̋̒̉͊̽̑̿͊ͬ͋̿ͣ͝͞✋̊̐̎̍̽̏̑̎͋͗̿̌͆̒̃́̓̚҉͈̤͓̞͉͚̫̜̝̠̗͍̱͖͟͟͝͠ͅ ̀͊̓ͫͧ͒̐̀҉̛̝̥͎̫̘͖̬̫͔̩͚͔̤͎̰̯̭͘͞ ̸͓͈̗̰͙͈͇̤̫̲̥̗̭̠̻̐̌̾̍̇͞ͅ ̴̰͉̘̘̳͕͎͓͓̮̟̪̞̟̤̯̎͛̀ͣͨ͂ͯ̐ͧͧ̄͛͊ͭͦ̃̊̍̚̕͠ͅ✋̧̪̜̗͚̰͍̖̗̥̯̙͚̪̯̰̈́̏ͮ͘͢͞͡ ̵̢ͣ̽͒͋̽ͥͣ̒̍ͣͣ̿͟҉҉̙͇͚̱͖̘̻͕̮̫ͅ ͍̯̘̻͎͕̙͈̬̰̮̱͔͍̝̟̱̓ͪ̅̎̊̓͞ ͯ̇̌͐̽ͮͦ̂̾̓̉ͫ̋ͫ͢͏͇̖̱̭̮̪̭͓̲̭͘͜ ̯̳̟͉̪͍ͦ̏̍̇ͧ̍ͨ̔͜͝ ̶̷͖͍̩͉̘͈̮̘̲̬̀̿̆͊ͅ ̖̜̻͔̺̰̫̝̦͍̻͕̟͉̲̐̆ͯ̓͒͌̈̏͂̄̚͜͡͝✋̡̬̯̼̩͍͙̫͑̈̓̕͜͞❄̶̵̺̠͙̼̮͇̱ͫ̆͋̏̿́͂͛ͦ̂͊͋̃̆̒͡ ̷̴͉̯͓̲̟̱̦̗ͬ̽ͩ̊̈͗ͯͯ̑̆̚͘ ̷̴̛̣̘̺̹̦̬̜̼̫͕̟̻̬̯̩̩̳̬͆ͩ͋̀͑̿̄̒̉̓͆ͭ̓͘͡ͅ ̰͔̤̬̯̠̞̪͙̘̺̽̿̏ͯ͘͢br /̴̧̭̥̳͎̹̮̰͕̯̮͇͖͒ͮ̎͝ͅͅ✋̧̨̜͙̼͔̿͊̔́̐̔ͫͥ̽͂̄ ̺̣̥̬̮̜̯̖̟͙̲̠̣͖̂̀ͥ̀̍̉ͯ̉̀ͦ̈̉͋̀͛̈̕̕ ̹̘̣̠͚̾̃ͣ̇̈̔̑̅̒̎͌͂̐͟͢ͅ ̴̧̡͍̭͙͓̣̭̪̩̻̖͙̮̲ͯͥͮ̈̂̋͒̂̊ͥͮͭ̿͜ͅ✋̺̻̜͍̒̉̇ͨ̐͟͜ͅ ̩͙̺͚̯̖̻ͫ̊̇ͭ͘͟ ̴̡̛̙͚̙̘̘̭ͩ̆͌ͮͪͥ̂̋̈́̊̓̽ͯͪ͛ ̛͍̺͓̝͕̭̙͐̓̊͊͆̑̐ͤͮͣ̆ͥͬ̉́ͮ͒̚͝✌̷͈̱̗̺̹̝͙̲͍̖̪̙̼̰͚̳͇̳̫̈́ͬͥͧ̔͌̇ͧ̇͒ͫ̂̔̒̐̈́͌̚̕ ̶̨͇̠̹̳̜̪̼̺͖̜̲͑̄̃̎̂̅̂̌✌̢̏ͪ̋ͬ͒̿҉̘͉̣̭̘̞̣̫͍̫͖̖ ͙͔͚̺̟̦̫͎̗̳͓̗̼͎͖̲͕̳͗̄́̌̍̓ͭ͗̍ͭ̏̀ͩ̏̇̒ͥͪ͌͘͞͞✡̩̬̫̞̳̠͑ͯ̓ͭͥ̄ͤ́͐̾̓̉̇̋̎̋͆̌͞͡ ̷͌̉ͫ̈ͪ͏̴͎̫̣̻͇͍̫̰̭̲̟̭͜ ̶͚̥̝͉̰̣͉͎͖̗̦̟̄ͭ̀ͩ̆ͫͧͭͮ̏̈̃͐͌̅̐̒̔̐͢͞͞ ̨̛͖͈̰̫̪͉̠͎̩̠̘̼̞̖ͫͫ͋ͤ̓͡͝͞ ̛̖̤̗̜̤͉͙̗̠̱̤̜͋̔ͥ̇͠ ̍͌͑̓̀ͭ̔͗͒ͣ͋̈̂ͪͬ̅ͤ͏̥̙̘̖͎̣̰̭̻͈͇✌̴̡͔̳̖̥̫̺͚̭̜̏ͫ̇ͭ͢͟͡ ̨̘̳͙̮̖̳̘̼̥̈̾͒ͧ̆ͧ͗̾̒ͦ̅̾̔͝ ͩ̇̂͊̏̎͏̖̘͍̬͔͍͕̺͍̕ ̷͉͍͍̗̬̱̖̲̰̤̑͋̾ͧ͢ ̹͓̩̜͙̣̾̈́̓ͩ̋̍ͭ́̌̒̄̃͂̈́̌ͪ̚͞ ̧̫̻͎͕̩̖̬̥̜̩̠̩̭̖̗̋̈̈́ͣ̓̔̽̽̍̃͠͡ͅ ̛̗̥̟̪͓͈̼͍͙̪̭̞̩̟̤̞̲͈͂̾̓̚̕͘✌̢̨̙͉̼̠̩̱̖͇͈̖̳͈̖͒ͪ̏̄͑̆̀̂ͪ̎̚ ̸̶̢̝̞̗̝̠̟̭̠̖̜̇ͪ̆̌̌̈́̅͌ ̾͌̒̄ͫ͂̐͆̊̎̏̓̅ͩ̚͘̕͜҉̩̫͍̘̼̟̞̗̱͕̪̩̹̟̩͟ ̾̌ͫͤͥͪ̇̕͟͏͔̦̺͚͍͔͈͍̺̝̬ͅ ̃͒̿̔ͭͫͪ̏͛̔̇̓͋̈̀͌̂͛҉̸̡͙̦͇̲̩̙̱͎̠̘͕͙̬͖ͅ✋̨̥̙̩̬̱̝͚͚̜̔̉͆̇͆̾̾͊̎ͪ̓̅̂̂̈́̚ͅ❄̨̛̛̤̲͚̬̦̩̫͓̳̪̽͑͌̆̈͒̔̌͒ͩ̈́͐͜ ͌̈͗̔͌ͣͬ̆ͪ̄̊͊̓ͯ͋ͬ҉̡̛͔̦̠̭̕ͅ ̨̣͙̻̩͖̪̩̠̤̱̯̲̯ͯ̑ͥͫ̏̈́͗̋ͮ͊̄ͨ́̉̈́̐ ͍͚͔͓̺̫͒̓̌̔͜✋̴̠͕̟̮ͫͭͫͫ̿͞͠ ̥̰͕̝͕̜̜̮̜̤͚̜͕̣̠͎͍ͨ̆̃̋ͭ̂̓͒͘̕͜͜ ̿̏ͨ̈͆ͫͥ͂̂ͪ́ͨ͑͏̡̞̥̝̟̬̳͜͝ ̢͖͎̯̞̐̊̾̓͗̀͗̌̆̂̓ͯ͒͑̂ͯ̓͒͜✋̶ͨ̐͌̾͂̿ͧ͑ͮ̈́͊̆͌͌҉͠͏̗̥̣̣̟͎̱͇̼̫͙̥͓̝̼̩͇ ̶̢̡̧̠̲̖̭̳̲̯̤ͬ̑̐̍̀ͨ̑ͨ̾̌̽͗ ̶̰̻̱̩̖̫̳̯͓́ͨ̂̒̌ͩ̿͒̀̍̉ ̶̧̖͇̲͈͕͉̪͎̞̳̗̻͖ͮͩͭͯ͒ͩ͋̎͢ͅ ̀͂̓̏͒ͮ̃̃̿ͭ̾ͯ͒̎̇ͮ͘҉̴̰̺̼͓̫̞͍̼̺̙̣͓̬̥͈͈̳̘̻̕ ̳̰̬̹̰͚̹̫̰̬͉͎̬̊̒̿̎̈́̔͜͞❄̎͑͋̈̏̽ͥ̊̅ͮͫ̂ͣ̀͏̷̩̫͎̪̠̲̬̻͚̺̖̝̺͜͝͡ͅ✌̶̨̠͕̦̥̬͔̻̤̪͚͖͍̱̞ͣ͛̉͐ͫ̇ͯ͟͞ ͚̰̺̘̫̹̙̮͎͍͎͎̠̖̗̈́ͣ̎̍̿͒̍ͧ͋͠ ͉̲̱͖̖̤̗̠̳̹̝̙̮̠͗́̑ͦͭ̚͜ ̨̟̞̫̱̼̩̌͋ͧͬ́͞͝ͅ ̶̸͋̒̍̔͋͐͗ͫ̅ͭ̋ͤ҉̸̖̝̺̪̖̝̤̼͉͔ ̮̼͕ͬ͊͗̑̎ͪ̂ͨ̄̓ͩ̈́̓̔͗́̚̚͢͢ͅbr /̵̷͈̹̣̼͕̽̈́̊̊ͥ̃ͨ͂ͣ͌ͩͩͬ̓̉ͯͫ͞✋̶̡̞̣̘̦͎̰̫͖͍̹͈͚͉̗͔͋̉ͩ̔̅̄̓̄ ̸̷̢̮̲̣̟͒ͯ̎̅̈̌͑ͤ͗ͣ ̸ͨ̓̓͗̐ͦ̾̌ͫ͐̓̓ͮ͆̆ͣͨ̾̓͝҉͖̘͔̳̞̥̞̭̫̥̼͔̰̪͍͓̥͠ ̩̭̦̞̦͈̖̍͌̿̇̾̚͘͜͡✋̡͇͉̺͇̖͖̪͔͕̼̭͚ͣ̈̏̐̈́̂̃̈̕͘͢͡ͅ ̂ͯ͗͗ͧ̓̇ͭ̍̅͊͗̀͆̐͑̾̇҉͏̟̠̠̼͓͉͍͚̤͚̮̞̗͇͔̻̮͙ ͓͕̺͈̦̹̪͕͓̙̙̲ͣ͒̅̂ͨ̔̋ͮ͗̿͆̌ͦ͐̋͒͂̾͜͠ ̧̞̻̣͎͇͈ͥ̒̂̽ͭ͑ͧ́ͤ͐͘͟͡͞ͅ ͖͓̗͎̭̮̲̺̞̩̫̅ͥ͊ͫ̈̽̓̀̇̓̑ͩ͊̋̎͊ ̛͇̪̯̬͖̩̱̟̈̀̈͂ͯ̐͌͆͌͒ͯ̆͝͝❄̴̵͍̰̮̰͋ͪ͌̎̾̅̎̓ͣ̎ͨͦ̈ͣ͝✌̴͙̞̬̰͖̣̱̙͖̙̥̲̞̔̔ͥ̒̀̔͜͢͟͠ͅ ̴̒̅̅̄̃͂̏̆͆ͨͨ̈͗̐̓̊҉͙̹̥͚̰̣̝̤ ̵̨̻̲̻̦̪̞͎̪͗̍̏ͨ̍̎̋ͤ͑̽̀͋̓̏̒͊ ̢̹̙͉̼͈̇̾͗̏̄ͭ́͟͝ ̢̧͓͓̼̣̣͈̻̪͕͕̹̠̰̻ͬͦͨ̄ͬ̏̓̈́ͭͯ̕͡ ̷̶̧͔̬̝͙̥͇̤̩̜̙͈͈̞̦́͒ͯ̂̔̂̽ͨͪ͛ͨ͢ͅ ͯͬ̏͒ͧͮͤ̋͑ͮͫ̈̕҉̯͙͓̰͚̻͔͈̝̬̥̹̺̠̯̳̖ͅbr /̶̧̛̝̥̮̝͇͚͔̱̼͉̖͍͔͙̠̭̞͕ͪ̒̓̿̌͗ͦ͂ͦ✋̢͗͆ͫ̂҉̹͔̮̪̙̮̣͔̲̟͚̳̤̼͔͝ ̿̀̎ͬ̒͏͏̫̲̖̩ͅ ̵̳̪̮͕̟̺̼̰̄ͩ̆ ̷̷͚͓̩̮̻͐̍ͩ̊̊̕͟͡ ̥̜̯̯͉̘̥͈̭̩̖̥͌ͪ̿̏̄̍ͩ̓ͦ͜ ̿͑̅ͣ҉̷̝͚̭͓͘͟ ̢͓̟͉͈̼͇̜̍̋̈́ͥͨ̃̃̀ͥͥ͝ ̷̛̤̻͙̼̫͊̽̂ͬ͒͢͢͡❄̸͒͂̋̽ͫ҉̸͈̲͙̼̙͖̖̱̖̼̦̫͓͖̖̬͝ ̵̨͓̭̠̺͇̪̠̭ͮ͂̑͆ͭ̚͟ ̸̞̖̼̜̩̼̳̥̪̦̠̤̥̖̫̺̥̲ͮͭͤ͛ͅ✋͕̖̼̫̣̪̜̙̥̫̖̩͇͔̳͇͔̉ͧ͆ͩͬ̾̕͡ͅ ̶̴̪̰͖̖͔̜̱̦͉̱͔̞͍̤̦̯̼̗̈ͩͬ̋͆̓̇ͮ͆̍ͩ͑ͨ͟͠ ̧̜̦̪̠̹͙̲̀ͨ̉ͥͧͨ̒̌̎̄ͭ͆ͩͫ̅͛̊̉̚ ̴̦̼͙̠͍̦̜̖̖̻͓͎̏̄͐ͦ͐̊̽ͤ͒͟͜ͅ ̛̛̙̬̠͙̼̼̮̬̻̺͍̥̠̬͓̩̣̆̋̇ͮͣ͛̆̃͗ͦ̄̇ͧ̾͠ ̛̗̹̖̱̣̣͔̝͚̣͈̗ͧ̑̿̽̑̿̚̚͝ ̷̧̤͇̹̣͚̗̖͖̱ͨ͗͋̋͂͌̒͜͢ ̴̧̖̫̣̜͖ͪ͆̔̾͆ͪ̏ͥ͆͡ ̸̛̛̙̝̟̜̤̃̆͑͐͛̾̾̓̑̿̾̒ͪ͒̕ ̇͌̋̉ͣ̅̋̽͐̋̆̄̃̌̄̀͋͏̨͢͏̻̝̥̠̘͘ ̫̠͎̘̫͖̰͋ͨ̀ͩ̏͆̓̍͒̈̂ͥ̾͊ͤ͗ͯͨͪ͟͠ ̡̪̞̮̯̼͓̦͒͋̃̔̅ͧ̉ͮ̉͛̾̚͠/p  
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	30. Chapter 30

Sleep. I loved sleep. I always have. Yer how much it seems to betray me now.  
I drifted inside of my cloud, a dose of primal fear keeping me from slipping too far in, so I lived for awhile in between sleep and darkness.  
I woke up to a fog. Not the type of fog that makes the street gray and the lights all paralyzed, floating in the air. Mental fog, the type that blurred the cold floor that was touching my face, making me stare at Chara, noticing he was unconscious, and not doing anything about it.  
The lab.  
The lab.  
It had exploded.  
Yes. The explosion had rang through my ears so clearly. I could feel the debris cascading everywhere, a whiff of burned coal flooding its way into my lungs. I remembered it so lucidly, as clear and bright as day. Somewhere inside, I promised never to try this type of experiment again. We needed a new strategy...  
I lay there, mulling over my thoughts,.Chara only a few feet away from me. About a half a minute later, I heard some footsteps a-clomping down the lab stairs, and soon, I saw Asgore whipping around the corner with his old cerulean blazer still on. Without any type of hesitating, he called Toriel and ran to me, asking me if I was alright, asking how in the world this happened; I wanted to ask how in the world he found me here before I realized, yes, I'd told him where the lab was all those years ago. I managed to get to my feet before he could start shaking me, and I brushed him off of me, but blow me down if I didn't see him a little more relieved one I got up.  
Chara. No. No.  
His eyes were shut, locked closed. He can't be falling into the same place that Sans was, that same horrible place. I scrambled my hands over his jacket threads, coughing with a violent touch to it, barely hearing Asgore as he stepped away from me. Relief unbearably flooded me when Chara started coughing himself. He started to groan, and he told me it was tired, and I said it was alright, and that he could go back to sleep. I was going to take the words back after they slipped out of my mouth, but it was too late. Chara was already slumped over on the ground.  
Noticing the charring that had spread all over Chara from the explosion, I had Toriel wake him up to take a shower, checking him for any signs of internal bleeding or any obvious wounds before sending him off to a long rest after a last check for any wheezing in his lungs.  
He was alright. I made sure of that.  
I walked home, still coughing as violently as ever. I checked Sans, and to a twinge of disappointment that still weaved its way inside of me, he wasn't awake, asking me why in the world it was September now and his calendar still said August.  
Another hack from whatever had managed to get into my lungs convinced me to get some rest, but everything else screamed at me not to.  
As I was making my way to the kitchen to get cleaning supplies for the area downstairs, Asgore walked towards me, pinching the center of his forehead when he reached me. After an "excuse me", he sat himself down, and I was immediately pinpointing the causes for a headache. Stress...lack of sleep...something in his diet…  
"William?"  
I was about to tell him not to call me that, but there was something in the shaking of his voice that told me to keep quiet.  
"What were you doing in the lab?"  
I spun around, spurted out the first thing I could remember, saying a somewhat-convoluted speech about SOUL frequencies that even I didn't know much about. He nodded, although there was something inside of me that convoluted a little as well.  
I remember scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing at the charred areas until my elbows ached and the artificial sun the Underground had shifted from its place outside and stared, cock-eyed, right in the window. I didn't worry about Papyrus at all. I didn't worry about Sans, either. As long as they were together, I thought at the moment, they would be alright. Not even a coma could separate them both. When the ache started to spread into my shoulders, I could see Asgore's form walking towards the lab. Asgore took over, and before I could think in the next twenty minutes to say no, the mess was already gone. Asgore's fingers were filled to the brim with dirt, and his face was caked with the soot that had seemed to spread anywhere. I almost thought he was about to cough up something foul from his lungs, but he never did.  
Asgore heaved the scrub brush on the table like it was a stone.  
He left with one sentence: "I've had to clean up much more than that, y'know."


	31. Chapter 31

The siege continued over those long weeks, but it was mainly attacks to draw out the citizens and nothing more. By now, I had gotten a feel for Betty's mind, what sort of gears made it turn. She'd launch a fight, direct and head-on, towards someone strategic, like Chara or I, and then slink away and pick off whoever she could until someone else summoned the nerve to fight her. It was as if she was taunting us.  
Toriel and Asgore, emotionally, didn't know what to do with themselves. While they spent their days evacuating some of their subjects, they sometimes ended the nights in manic celebrations, dancing to country music complete with charming twang and stupid lyrics. Other nights would end with Toriel crying until the moon shot itself up to the sky, Asgore already having rolled over and fallen asleep. But some things still held constant. On one particularly tear-filled night, they asked Chara to stop wearing his yellow and green shirt. Their voices were shaky when they were discussing with Chara about any hope they had to get Asriel back. So far, Chara was concocting a plan of some sort to meet Asriel someplace, but none of us really knew the logistics of it.  
Jessica was, as anyone could guess, busy. She was still recovering, and each meal brought new pain to her old stomach wound. But when she could, she was tending as much as possible to the Anti-Monster Department, who try as it might, still kept its old name. There were some cases of Human Security Organization workers who would abandon monsters and leave them to die, and bringing those monsters to their justice often took a substantial portion of her time.  
Undyne was hungry. Hungry to fight, hungry to rest, hungry for everything she'd lost. Out of any of us, she deserved that hunger. And she did put it to good use. Every day, before the rest of us would wake up, she'd tuck her police officer's uniform out of the pile we'd arranged in the corner for her clothes and run outside, doing who knows what, killing God knows how many Betty's minions before the pain dragged her home by dinnertime.  
Papyrus was just… Papyrus. Still smiling, still cooking, still making sure that everyone had a smile on their faces before he even let a tear slip down his. Papyrus was still pursuing his law enforcement degree… at least, that was what he said… but it was a while before I saw any sort of paperwork on his desk.  
And I… and I…  
I questioned whether or not Sans still had any brain activity beyond the ability to breathe on his own.  
Each time Papyrus entered that little room, he started to wipe off whatever sort of glee he'd built up for himself whenever he helped those around him. Whether or not it was sadness or some type of reverence, I wasn't sure. But whatever it was, it seemed to darken Papyrus' mood, and one day, without telling him, without telling anyone, I slipped Sans into my arms, a bundle again, buckling the both of us in the van this time to drive to the mountain so neither of us would be cold.  
When I got to the lab, after dusting it off for quite awhile, I ran some tests. His brain activity was heightened in his parietal lobe. The parietal lobe has to do with language, perception, attention, and awareness.  
He wanted to say something. Or he wanted something in general.  
I had to stay in that chair for a half an hour, the thoughts almost, although not quite, dragging me to sleep. In my own brain, a thought echoed, back and forth, about how I hadn't gotten a second of sleep in the past three days, although I quickly brushed it off. I would have brushed it off even quicker if it weren't for me remembering how I had almost hit one of the trees on the way to the mountain's base.  
He wanted something. He wanted something.  
But what did he want?  
Alphys, before she herself died, had instructed me in what to do in case someone had fallen down. She said she kept a pamphlet on her desk, although she didn't want me to open it in case I absolutely needed it.  
So I filled up his IV tube one last time, went out to her adjacent lab just a few miles away. I almost considered not going there when the first whiff of ramen noodles, of all stupid things, hitting me, but I realized how stupid I was being and focused myself on the heat instead.  
Most of the lab was untouched other than that pamphlet. The TV had been running for so long that a snapshot of what must have been one of her favorite anime characters was frozen on it. There were a few clumps of dirt in the corners, a few cobwebs in the ceiling. I had to tell those spiders that Muffet had already moved to the Surface, and before long, the spiders scuttled away, leaving me to dust them off.  
The pamphlet.  
I had to find it under a mountain of what would have been a novel Alphys was keen on finishing, a journal she was keen on finishing. I saw something with Undyne's picture on it that I had to brush off to the side in order to keep the grief from pulling me into a small cloud once again.  
I could have sworn I heard whispers, but I figured it was just the wind outside. Shutting the door, I went back, combed through a paper of what would never be. When the whispers were still there, I didn't waste any time getting out of that lab. A few trace stories stuck at the back of my mind of some ghosts living where there was the most trauma. If that was so, what the hel had happened at her lab?  
I almost envied Sans lying in the bed when I got to the lab, locking the door behind me in reflex.  
The pamphlet's introduction was about using Determination in order to revive those who were Fallen Down, and I shut the pamphlet. I didn't have to read it any further to know how those experiments went wrong. I remembered their families walking in to see them alive again, their eyes full of unadulterated glee when they walked in that door, vomiting out of pure stress when they left. I remembered even the children becoming desensitized to pain after witnessing one of their loved ones who was Fallen Down being revived this way, one of them breaking their arm without so much as flinching.  
I couldn't do it.  
I couldn't do it.  
His breathing was slowing down.  
My son was going to die.  
The first night I stayed in that lab, I remember going to the grocery store in a hellish food run, the chaos of Betty's siege erupting around me. On the way back, I helped one human escape, but I couldn't ignore what was right in front of me. I couldn't do it.  
The second night, I came to no conclusions. I ran all the tests, but still I came to no conclusions. I almost expected his eyes to snap open, scaring me. Even that would be better than him staying an unopened toy, eyes shut. A cough that left me wheezing near the end convinced me to hook myself up to the oxygen mask that wasn't very far from Sans' bed.  
The third night, I went to the chapel across town. Of course, there was only one pew left standing, and a few windows here and there left to focus on, but still I went. I prayed to someone I knew wasn't there, someone I knew was a delusion from Day 1 that I started my research.  
The fourth night, as I thought and maybe feared, my delusion didn't answer me. Still my son lay, still I ran every test and came to nothing. I called Papyrus, left him a slurred, sleep-deprived message of how sorry I was that I wasn't home.  
The fifth night, I remember running one of the tests for the third time, skimming through the pamphlet for the second time, skimming through it again, again, again. Again and again. The headache that had been slowly creeping up on me this whole time hit me in full force now that I was reading, and my head almost dropped to the desk.  
But that didn't stop me.  
His breathing was slowing down.  
My son was going to die.  
I was a zombie, as sluggish as I was. Nothing could stop me. I was a gambler, obsessed with my own creation. I stalked out of the door, stalked to the van, stalked past the woods. I ceased to be a man. I ceased to be a monster. I didn't know what I was as I went into town. Each attack I dodged, but what else was I?  
Past the grocery store I walked. Past the chapel. Past our neighborhood. Past my house, and despite it being pitch-black, I waved hello. Past the highway, the cars sweeping up my coat to the left. Past the lone Human-Security Organization officer who said something about what I was doing being illegal, but I all but shrugged it off. Past the first exit, past my aching feet . Past a kind man who didn't even introduce me his name, asking me if I needed a ride out. Past me shaking my head no. Past the second exit. Past the plot of land, the cows having been evacuated a long time ago.  
Finally, the arena.  
There was a splatter on the ground from Undyne after fighting with Betty. A perfect combination between monster blood and Determination. I remember the smile lighting up my face, although a child who was wandering through the fields that day was the only one who remembers me laughing about it for what must have been a minute and a half.  
His breathing was slowing down.  
My son was going to die.  
I stared. I stared at the blood dripping into the IV bag. I stared at it flowing down the injection port, watched it struggle its way into the tube before I diluted it with water. I almost blacked out. But that didn't stop me.  
His breathing was  
slowing  
down.  
My son was going  
to die.  
I kept on staring as the diluted blood flowed into my son's arm, watched it, knowing it was multiplying, but feeling something else caving in on itself. I kept on waiting, watched it all flow, drip by drip, until each and every piece of it ran out. Tiredness chipped away at me, and the clock struck six- that must have been Alphys' alarm- before I even thought to run tests.  
With each test, the hope that I had piping up inside of me faded, little by little. While I wasn't devastated by the news, I was crushed. Those are two different things. If I didn't have any suspicion, and I was shown the results, I would be devastated. Catatonic. But since I did have suspicion, it was just a loss of hope, gradual and contagious, at that point.  
The DETERMINATION had only hurt him instead of helped him.  
Oh, yes, he was going to wake up. There wasn't any doubt about that. But it wouldn't help at all with his condition.  
He was going to die.  
He was going to be in pain.  
Horrible, horrible pain.  
And it was all my fault.  
All my fault.  
I wasn't a man.  
I wasn't a monster.  
I wasn't even neither.  
I was nothing.  
The clock struck seven.  
I shook. I shook, I shook, I shook. I found a vial, innocent as it was.  
And I hurled it against the floor.  
The vial shattered into the same number of pieces as the tears that went down my face.


	32. Chapter 32

The pieces stared up at me, and Sans didn't have the ability to stare.  
I stayed for what seemed like hours, and though I knew it was either shorter or longer than that, I'm not sure exactly how long I stayed there. But I did stay there, the heart monitor the only song playing in the background, staring right back at the vial.  
What kind of scientist was I?  
What kind of father was I?  
I had all but failed as a scientist. As a scientist, I was supposed to bring him back without any sort of pain. I was supposed to completely reverse his condition, I was supposed to repair the damage done by the trauma instead of cause complications. I was supposed to….  
I was supposed to….  
God, what was I supposed to do?  
What kind of father was I?  
Not a father who would abandon a child. Not a father who would spend days with his brother, but not him. Not a father who would lose… what was it, three… four days of sleep.  
I wasn't a father.  
But I could still try to be the father that Papyrus thought I was.  
The cloud waved hello and introduced himself as death.  
He told me to stop fighting him.  
I nodded.  
I disconnected the heart monitor and brought Sans back home.  
I held him closer.

I'm going to tell him.  
As I went home, Asgore tried asking me questions that he snuck at least one scientific word in, but I just ended up shaking my head. Asgore muttered that he was sorry before going back to his family, picking up the pieces of his own life that had been thrown on the floor like that vial.  
I'm going to tell him.  
I'm going to tell Papyrus exactly what's happening to Sans. I'm going to tell him all of the mistakes that I made with him, all that I did, all that I failed to do. I'm not going to lose him in scientific terminology, either, or at least I'm going to try not to. I'm going to tell him everything.  
After putting Sans back into his bed, not turning off the lights to his room this time, I went upstairs, yelling as loud as my soot-tinged voice would allow me to that I was home. Thinking that Papyrus wouldn't bother to come, wherever he was at, I sat down at his room, snatched out a page from the small scientific spiral notebook in my pocket, and started to write. By the time I got past "I don't know how to voice this, but-", Papyrus was already in the room.  
"HELLO, DAD. HOW GOES THINGS?"  
How goes things. Probably the funniest question I could think of at the moment.  
"Well, you see-"  
"HAVE YOU GOTTEN ANY SLEEP?"  
Dear Papyrus. I don't know what I did to deserve you. Or to deserve myself.  
"A little."  
"WHAT WERE YOU DOING THERE?"  
I let my foot slide against the ground. "Research."'  
"WOWIE! THAT MUST HAVE BEEN A LOT."  
All I could do was nod. Just as I was articulating how I was going to say it, how I was going to prepare him for this newfound hel, just as I was going to prepare all of us for the hours, days, God knows how long, after Sans woke up, it all tumbled out of his mouth.  
"MISS RUTROW REALLY, REALLY WANTS TO STOP BETTY, AND SHE WANTS TO STOP HER FOR GOOD, AND SHE'S ORGANIZING ALL OF HER MEN, AND SHE'S CALLED THAT NICE LADY SOPHIA AND SHE'S HELPING OUT TOO. BUT MISS RUTROW SAYS MY ENVIRONMENT IS… TOO… ABSENT."  
There came the berating. I slunk a bit in my chair.  
"YOU HAVE BEEN GONE FOR AWHILE NOW. WHAT'S WRONG?"  
I prayed he didn't notice me fumble around in my pocket for nothing in particular, or hear my feet scraping against the ground. "The soot, Papyrus, it went in my lungs, and I had to get myself treated…"  
"OH. ALRIGHT."  
He didn't even hesitate.  
"WELL, JESSICA WANTS TO TAKE ME WITH HER."  
Instinct took over before I could articulate any sort of thought, and before I knew it, I was chasing Papyrus down the stairs. The page in my notebook that had been damaged during my aimless fumbling flew out, the air smacking my face.  
"Wait! Wait! No, don't-"  
Papyrus stopped at the bottom of the stairs so quick that I almost toppled smack-dab in the center of my face. Had Sans been awake, he would have laughed so hard he himself would have started to cough. I could see Jessica making her way from the kitchen to the living room, clutching her stomach just a little before she caught sight of us.  
"DON'T WHAT?" His voice was a little timid now.  
I took a few deep breaths. I couldn't let my rage go into full speed now; otherwise, Jessica would bring it up for an agonizingly long period of time before letting it go.  
"Don't… go with her. Please."  
He sat down on the couch, Jessica somewhere in the back of the room, and for the first time I could remember in those weeks, I felt as if I were the child in the conversation instead of the adult. Then again, when could I ever be the adult in this situation?  
He looked at me with a gaze that was kind, but that any child would squirm themselves away from in a heartbeat. "WHY NOT?"  
"Because… it's not safe. You'll be fighting, right?"  
"OF COURSE I'LL BE FIGHTING. BUT I'VE PREPARED FOR FIGHTING FOR AWHILE, AND… I THINK I'M READY. THIS IS WHY I WANTED TO GO OVER THIS WITH YOU, AND-"  
Of course he had. I was in the Void. I'd missed that, and I'd practically missed the entirety of my sons' time growing up. What kind of father was I? What kind of father did Papyrus think I was?  
I slumped a little in my seat.  
By God, whatever delusion hung above, I was going to be the father he still thought I was.  
"No. You can't go. I don't want you getting hurt, that's all."  
He hesitated for a split second, Jessica staring at the both of us in a tentative type of desperation. I thought that he would hurl a few anger-filled sentences at mr, thought that he would go to his room, go anywhere and everywhere that I wasn't. Because that's what I would do if I were him.  
He moved closer to me. Despite it all.  
He clung onto me, pulled me into what I believe was his most complete embrace. There were no tears, no lengthy speeches. But he held me like I held Sans, and I could feel what Sans must have felt. Something completely against all logic, against every medical device's reasoning. And I hugged him, too. I gave him everything I had, gave him the best apology I could muster. Unlike Jessica's, it was strong- no, that was the wrong term. It was conductive.  
That was until I glanced to the right.  
Then, I found that not all was right, and something had buried very, very deeply into the primal side of my brain. Something in the way that Papyrus was holding my arm ,the way he gripped to the side, the way he held onto me, the way he held too deeply. The way he forced those words out of my mouth, having me choke them out rather than say them.  
"Papyrus… I'm not asking you to stay."  
What I had to do was something that still keeps me up at night to this day, keeps me staring at the mirror wondering who the hel I am.  
I restrained him. I shot out whatever my rage directed me too, and it was beautiful. It was awful. It clung onto his shoulders, wrapped itself around its arms until they found itself throbbing. We monsters were cursed, and it seemed that I was brought under this curse too. I could hear Jessica gasping, even as Papyrus remained silent. God, he remained silent. He stared at me. He stared right into my eyes, even when I could feel the tears gathering on them.  
By the time the Dreemurr family had rushed to the foyer, Papyrus was still staring at me with that terrifyingly stoic expression of his.  
Which was why I didn't know why I was caught off guard when he retaliated.  
I'd stopped all of my attacks as soon as he fought back, of course. There was nothing in the world, nothing beyond this world, nothing beneath this world, that could lead me to hurt him. But this time, his speech came in a throbbing muffle. I stared at my arm, and my world turned into something… something else.  
No. No. No.  
I was back in the Nullfier Room. Betty was fighting me off, my son's little-death still being fresh in my mind. I could hear Betty's laughter stabbing my ears, those same restraints that had held my then holding my now… I hate this, I hate this…  
"Let GO of me!"  
The words came slowly, came more as a gurgling yell from my throat than something I would have said had I been in the right mind in front of Papyrus. I wrenched my hand from the restraints, from the blue bones he and his brother had been trained to use.  
Thank God Sans was the way he was.  
I crushed Papyrus. I flung him against the wall. I didn't know who I had become. I didn't know why I had become this way. My brain was dictating each and every move, screaming at me to toss him against the wall in the same way I tossed Betty, because her and him were one and the same, him and her were one and the same, him and her were one and the same-  
I stopped.  
And I trembled.  
I trembled.  
I was brutal. I was enigmatic. I was dazzling. For once, for once, I was everything my sons didn't want me to be and more. I was a god.  
But now, I was nothing. I was nothing but nothing.  
And my son was clutching his arm, trying to stem the blood trickling down. Toriel immediately sprinted over, put her hands on his arm. I stepped in the most tentative of steps towards him, but he pushed me away, and I could see the tears trailing down his face, and I was nothing.  
I was nothing.  
"THAT HURT."  
He was looking up at me. He hadn't let himself wipe a single one of his tears. He was just as he was before, looking straight into my eyes.  
"BUT THAT DIDN'T HURT AS MUCH AS WHEN I SAW YOU WOUNDED BY BETTY. OR WHEN YOU LIED TO ME IN THE LAB."  
That punched me twice as hard as his attacks did. While I didn't reel, I bit my lip, and I stared at the floor. There wasn't any way I would be ready to look into his eyes, and I wouldn't be able to look into anyone's eyes for a good amount of time.  
He knew. He knew his brother was dying, he knew how tightly the pain would grip him. How tightly it would grip us all.  
I was nothing.  
I could hear his head whip around to the others, who had no doubt gathered into a fight-size circle by now. "OR WHEN ANY OF YOU PREVENT ME FROM GETTING INVOLVED."  
No one spoke. THe heater churned in the background, but that was all.  
"SO, DAD…."  
How long had it been since he'd called me that?  
"I KNOW YOU'RE GOING THROUGH UNIMAGINABLE PAIN. AND…AND YOU CAN DRAG ME TO AND FROM THE LAB AS MUCH AS YOU WANT, YOU CAN PUSH ME AWAY AS MUCH AS YOU WANT, YOU CAN GET YOURSELF HURT AS MUCH AS I CAN'T PREVENT IT, BUT I WON'T LET YOU GO THROUGH THIS ALONE."  
"I know."  
I had the nerve to look up.  
"Which is...  
which is why I'm going for you."


	33. Chapter 33

The hours dragged on, as they often tend to do when sleep is taken from me. Papyrus' cut still haunted me, and still haunts me even now. Even the coat dragged on me, and I found myself dragging it harder, hoping it would make at least a little cut on me. My face lit up in disappointment for a moment before Jessica called me out the door. I said goodbye to Papyrus, went into Sans' room and tugged on his sheets, thinking for a split second that he could hear me, and I was out the door.  
I knew we were heading into a warzone. That much was clear. I could hear the sirens dying away, most of the citizens evacuated or dead. It was thinking about the former that tided me over to Jessica's van.  
I buckled myself in, having to look down at my hands for a few seconds to make sure there wasn't that same bundle in them that I needed to buckle up along with me. I thought that Jessica would say something, say something about all that I'd done to her, but she stayed silent. At least until she backed into the road so quickly that the van jerked, and my chest never really stopped hurting for that next hour.  
That coaxed the words out of my mouth. "Miss Rutrow-"  
"It's Jessica."  
I had to admit it. I was shocked.  
"Jessica… can we talk about-?"  
There were some things that never needed to be said, and by all means, this was one of them. Perhaps more than the current state of my son, although not too terribly more.  
She nodded, although I could hear the silence even from the back of the van.  
I sighed, and I could feel the bundle rolling its way off my chest.  
"There's so many things. So many things I'd like to say. But I can't-"  
"I understand."  
She understood? Out of all of the people I met, she understood. For just a minute, I overcame sleep, and the light from outside hit me more than I thought I could take at first. A quick glance at the clock told both her and I that I hadn't slept in over four days.  
"You're not a bad person."  
That was the closest I could get to a "sorry".  
She glanced towards a picture hanging down from the van ceiling, the slightest tear making some pieces of tape hang down.  
"Am I? Am I really?'  
I didn't need to be shown what that picture it was, but I knew Alina as there. Smiling, smiling as if she didn't know that one moment, everything in her life would be broken upside down.  
Still, Jessica didn't protest as I slumped my head against my shoulder, but I did nod a little, my eyes still closed, when she asked if I was comfortable sleeping like that.  
By the time the van jolted across the tiny speed bump that was the highway bridge, I was already half-asleep.

I didn't know what hel was until I'd entered the city.  
I could barely hear Jessica's voice at first. We had first entered in the most congested part of the city, and where monster-founded diners, human-founded malls, and gathering places of all sorts used to stand, there was nothing but rubble crumbling. Even Jessica's breath was stolen away from her; this was the first time in weeks she had been out on the streets instead of behind a PA system, behind a set of bars I seemed to put on her.  
And I was sorry for it.  
I was sorry for it, because when Jessica was too entranced to look away from an entire library give way to what must have been dozens of huge dents in the walls, I almost had to knock her over to keep the rubble from falling on her. I ended up shoving her halfheartedly, one of the bricks knocking in my head hard enough for there to be a bruise.  
None of us addressed it. I'd paid her back, if only a little. That was enough for now.  
The city had practically collapsed in on itself. The rubble had cascaded into all sorts of directions, and we even saw a child who was separated from our sight after the too-loud sound of the building in front of us crumbling. I could hear Jessica hold back a sob, and while I squeezed onto her shoulder, I pretended to squeeze it harder than I should have.  
I shuddered.  
We managed to rescue a few humans before we could get to the rendezvous point, but it was nowhere near enough. Years of hard work and human spirit were being demolished, one by one by one. Our city was now an old woman's heart, much too tired.  
I was about to heal a child with a tattered beanie who had broken her ankle while trying to rescue her brother. She told me how much she loved him, and she and I winced at the same time when I was setting her ankle back in the right place. I was about to sit down on one of the pieces of rubble, to unload all of the burdens of life that I could on her, but a warbling from Jessica's walkie talkie told me to go to the other side of town.  
It was quiet. Much too quiet for the leader of the Human Security of the Organizations to be waltzing her way down. Most of the buildings had already been abandoned, most of them sturdy. Betty's attacks seemed to be directed towards the center of town… a perfectly strategic approach, but an utterly devastating one nonetheless.  
Jessica and I didn't say anything. We only relished the quiet, but we never strayed more than twenty feet from each other. For twenty minutes, we strolled in an awkward dance. One time, in a feat of hunger, we both went into one of the abandoned houses, feasting on two biscuits, both of them a week old. We heard a horrible whistling sound in the air before we heard a muffled explosion. We thought nothing of it until we heard an ambulance, and it was then that I heard Jessica's sniffling that she insisted was her reaction to the kicked-up dust.  
But I knew she couldn't sell that bull for one second. I knew she couldn't. So for one moment, one moment that stretched out to easily hundreds of times more moments, I embraced her. I embraced her while more muffled explosions rang in the background, and one of the greatest things about it was that she didn't react. Not at all except for a smile that came after a few minutes of me scuttling to my seat, feeling my face exploding with redness, and fumbling with my notes to keep myself busy.  
The smile was ripped off of her face as soon as her phone rang again.  
After a "Hello", the expression that crossed her face seemed to hit her like a ton of bricks.  
"Come on. Gaster, we have to run."  
I heard a rumbling in the earth, no doubt brought on by my nervous legs bouncing up and down, up and down against the earth. I froze, but there was no other way I could process the fac that this was war.  
"Gaster!"  
I stood up, almost toppled to the dining room table, and the rumbling came steady. How I could run was beyond me, and how I could teleport was beyond the hole in my SOUL. While Jessica ran with ease… I had to remind herself that she grew up here… were earthquakes this common?... I positioned myself against the dining room table. Jessica was just about sick and tired of it, and with an unmistakable grimace on her face, she pulled me up to her shoulder.  
And we ran together, our feet almost perfectly crashing down on the ground at the same time.  
I'm not sure exactly when I numbed my ears to all that was going to pieces around us. That had probably started when the first sirens went of weeks and weeks ago, but now it seemed almost impossible to hear anything. At first, I thought the pieces of the building crashing behind us, most likely from Betty's miscellaneous attacks, were the result of the mix of my beating heart and my pounding feet. In a few minutes, we saw Sophia's blond hair whipping out of one of the still-empty buildings, and I could hear Jessica sigh the quietest sigh of relief before we all rushed in the building.  
"Thank God you two came. The attacks have… well, they've…"  
I knew there were certain things that only the buildings crashing around us could tell us.  
"Point is, again, I'm glad you came."  
"Same here," Jessica said, grunting a little as she lifted up that same ray, that same ray that she shot at my so-  
Inhale. Exhale.  
Let it out.  
Let everything out.  
"Now, before you called me, I was told by some of our troops that we needed some backup at the school."  
Sophie smiled, cocked her own weapon. I couldn't help but smile right back, even as we heard more than a few muffled thuds in the background that I prayed for thunder. For a moment, I let my thoughts run to back home.  
"Let's get this show on the road."

We only made it to the halfway point before the hounds of war were apparently released.  
I am unsure of what to say about what happened in that next hour except that if I thought the city was hel initially, I had plunged myself into one of its inner circles. Betty's own monsters, summoned by God knows what sort of magic, were rendering whatever they could touch haywire. They seemed not to see age, not to see gender, not to see selflessness.  
Speaking of selflessness, I made sure I wasn't completely deprived of it, or at least tried to. I managed to have Jessica no more than twenty feet away from me, just as it was before. I rescued a family from one of the buildings toppling over, but there were still so, so many more that slipped out of my fingertips. And as one was lunging towards Jessica, I shot it.  
And I shot the next. And the next. And the next.  
Soon, it turned into nothing. They were nothing more than my own hate, my finger was nothing more than something to destroy it. Not quite love, but not quite hate's own spawn, either. It was grey, and it was nothingness. And some part of me loved it. I couldn't help but smile a little in a way that would frighten both my sons as I killed what must have been my- I lost count.  
Dear God, I lost count.  
I lost count of how many I saw fall on the ground, although the count stopped when I saw a tuft of blonde hair, discarded in one of the alleys. I yelled, uncaring that Jessica was only a few feet behind me, rushed towards the tuft peeking out at me, realized it revealed a body, sprawled out against the slowly warming alley floor.  
Sweet Sophia. My poor, brave Sophia. Sophia's fracture in her neck was much too severe to have not completely cut off her brain stem. I didn't even try to initiate CPR.  
Sophia stared at me, but there was another fire behind her eyes, as if she was telling me, "Do it." And so I did.  
I fired at the blob in front of her. I fired at it until there was nothing left of it but a little ash. I continued to fire, hit the wall until it turned from the white I would normally look at on my computer screen back at home to the same black that was on my jacket.  
I fired until I felt the hand on my shoulder.  
I'd never seen Jessica cry before until that moment, and after hearing one more, just one more ambulance in the background, I let myself cry- no, I let myself wail. I wailed for the Anti-Monster Department, for every cruel thing it had ever said or done to us, for every propaganda poster hung, for every house that had been a victim of arson. I wailed for the police, readying themselves to haul Papyrus off to jail. I wailed for every minute that I watched my sons die from the unmistakable cold of the Void, and I wailed for the son who had reenacted it in front of me. I wailed for the inevitable pain that would come- I wailed for it all. I wailed for it all.  
I wailed like a little child, slumping over just a little, just a little, letting her catch me with all of her inhibitions. It was only a few seconds, or at least that was what I thought, that I let myself go. That I let my tears mix with everyone else's on this same city.  
My wailing was almost as loud as the roaring of Betty's largest creation, hanging just across that alley.  
I saw its shadow while I was wailing, watched it loom over every building, what was left of Sophie almost instantaneously being dwarfed, and my wailing turned into a shout as both Jessica and I ran.  
The buildings that were crashing around Jessica and I this time seemed to gradually build up to a collective explosion, and my lungs seemed to be exploding inside of me, the soot of the machine having not completely gone away.  
It was enormous. It must have been at least thirty feet. It wailed in almost the exact way that I did, but with an edge that reverberated off the buildings and sent a chill through Jessica so severe that I could hear it from where I was. We ran, but it kept on following us, kept on sending havoc everywhere it went, and the only thing we could do was to run where no one was so we could be the only ones to be trapped under it, and it didn't stop, and it didn't stop, and it didn't stop.  
It didn't stop until I started hallucinating. Or at least, that's what I thought I was doing. How else could an entire building be flung towards us, its windows catching our reflections?  
But Jessica's "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" sprung me back to life, and with everything I had, I stopped that building. I stopped it, and everything that was inside of me, all of the powers that I had repressed up until then, the building smacked against the edge of the green shield I had summoned, cracking it.  
Jessica looked behind her, no doubt thinking of running towards the other direction, until the horrible thing approached us from behind, shoved another building to the other side, and I was forced to block the both of us once again. At first, I was thinking of doing an evasive maneuver, but I heard another muffled thud. I thought it was an explosion, but with horror, I realized the creature was piling ton after ton of rubble on top of my shield, ready to exact its terrible gravity when the shield inevitably stopped.  
It was trapping us in.  
I'm not sure what I thought. The thought of death came running at me, of course, but more than that, there was a silent plea for help that I'm sure reached Jessica; after looking up in awe at the tons of rubble being piled on, she moved for her walkie-talkie, starting to hyperventilate when there was no one on the other end.  
Of course she couldn't get anyone's help. She hadn't been useful at all. Ever since the beginning.  
I heard a rumbling on top of me.  
Ever since she took out that gun and shot my-  
The shield disintegrated.  
The last thing I heard was Jessica's scream before my legs crumpled with agony and I lost consciousness.


	34. Chapter 34

It was then that I learned unconsciousness doesn't result in dreams.  
I woke up, and while I smiled for a few seconds, the pain in my legs very quickly led me to bite that pain back. Nausea started to seep in as I noticed there were only a few sparse places still peeking out to sunlight. Still peeking out to a place of plentiful oxygen. I opened my eyes, and when no light poured in, that's when I knew that the both of us were trapped under this pile.  
The both of us.  
"Jessica!" The name thudded onto the rocks, whipped its way back to me. That name. How much it had changed, how much it still desperately needed to change. "Jessica!"  
I heard someone walking, and when I heard her coughing, I stopped. "I'm here!"  
The light that suddenly bounced out from the lights in her helmet made me wince, but what made me wince even further was my legs. They were hurting, alright, and they were hurting for a reason that even I didn't want to acknowledge. After a few seconds of blinking, I saw that half of me was trapped under the rocks, half of me still alive in this hole.  
I was going to die.  
But I couldn't show that to her now. Despite knowing what would happen, she whipped out her walkie talkie, attempted to call some of her men. I couldn't see the tears on her face, but I could definitely hear them in her throat.  
I was going to die.  
"Go on ahead."  
She let the tears spill out on the floor. I winced, but it wasn't out of the pain my legs were being held under. But my heart was being squeezed by everything around me, all of my purpose spilling onto the ground. My oldest son, I had subjected to a death even I don't think I could have lived through. My youngest son, having to put up with his criminal record for the rest of his life. And my wife...oh, God, my wife...  
And Jessica nodded. Even as the rocks shifted, she closed her eyes. She held the teleporter to her chest as if it were a babe, and I sprawled out on the ground, waiting for everything to come to a halt. And I was happy.  
Still, I could feel the tears coming down my face, one for every hundred memories. "Do it. Do it, please. This is where I'm supposed to be."  
The rubble started to creak. Jessica stared at me, stared back down at the teleportation device, stared back at me. Her eyes drooped closed, opened again, and my suspicions that the oxygen in here was rapidly being replaced with carbon dioxide were confirmed.  
"Alina."  
Her eyes seemed to pierce mine, although I couldn't find who "Alina" was anywhere in my memory. I told her, and she winced, bowed her head a little. As she did, the rubble shifted even more, and it was then that I discovered the weight in my hand. She'd given the teleportation machine to me. I tried to wrench it off, but the teleportation process had already began. I could feel myself sinking, the "no" already starting to build iny chest.  
"My daughter. Her name was Alina."  
Only she and the rocks could have heard my ever-louder "no", louder and louder and louder, and as she laid herself down, clutched the photo to her chest as if her Alina was right by her side, I saw them coming down.  
My hand stretched out.  
Too late.  
Too late.  
I could only see a snapshot of just how much blood the rocks wrung out of her body before I was back home.


	35. Chapter 35

She was dead. I knew she was.  
I knew that someone who had lost that much amount of blood in that amount of time would have their heart stop in a matter of seconds. I knew that there was no logical reasoning that would lead me to expect her coming down the hallway. I knew that there was no logical reasoning for me not to cry.  
But despite all that she'd done for me, despite all that I'd done to her… I felt numb. She'd saved my life, hadn't she? I felt numb. Too numb to process anything emotionally, too numb to process anything physically. And that was how I was unaware of the noises roaring from the edges of our house, at least for those first few moments.  
That was until I saw the blood.  
For a moment, I was back in the cavern, back to saying goodbye to someone I knew wasn't here, someone I knew would never come back. But in the next, I was sprinting towards the blood, knowing that it wasn't mine and it wasn't hers.  
I saw Papyrus on the ground, surrounded on all sides by some of Betty's smaller minions.  
So battered. So brave. I love him so.  
I was going to defeat them all by myself, but Papyrus roused himself awake halfway through and, to my surprise, killed half of them before slumping back down against my shoulder. The house was quiet now. Chillingly quiet, as if a storm had just passed over. I didn't know when the next one would strike, or if there would be a next one at all.  
Papyrus yelled out in pain, and I realized I'd touched his shoulder, which had been stabbed through. I sprinted him to the couch, and slowly, slowly, surely, surely, the cut disappeared. He wasn't nearly as battered as I was when Betty had fought me in that kingdom, that piece of time long, long ago, but that didn't stop me from embracing him.  
And I embraced him for a full half an hour, the clock behind me ticking in a monotonous song.


	36. Chapter 36

But another song broke through.  
Something… felt different. As a scientist, I'm not supposed to say I can feel these sorts of things. It goes against logic. But it was as if my cerebrum was all discombobulated, each and every sound pouring in a different way, an eerie way. The heat pumping out of the furnace was a little colder than usual. The family pictures on the wall hung a little more crooked than usual. And there was a taste in the air that comes whenever I'm out of the house for longer than a few hours.  
It was only a few hours later that I learned death had been the one to do it.  
But not yet. Not yet.  
"DaaaAAAAd!"  
It had come from that room in the back where I'd put him, surrounded by countless IV tubes and tools for medical procedures I knew wouldn't do anything but confirm what I already knew. It had come from that room I had chosen with care, that same room him and his brother used to play countless chess games with when we'd first moved into the house.  
Sans.  
My legs lurched forward, but everything else in me stopped. The air hung in the air, all dark and complete. I nearly tripped, the sunlight almost stabbing me now, and my breaths turned into hiccups in my throat. Papyrus followed, but he was a wisp now, a trace I could barely detect.  
He'd woken up.  
All I wanted for him was to go in peace.  
That was all that I wanted.  
Was that too much to expect?  
I stepped inside the room, and I didn't know I was shaking until I stepped in the door and almost stumbled against the wall.  
All I wanted for him was to not be in pain. Is that too much to ask? Is it?  
The heart monitor activated for the first time in days, and it seemed as if my heart skyrocketed along with it. I could tell he was in more pain than I've ever been in before I even went close to him. His eyes were all blue, and the same eyes that had the type of wonder to leave even me transfixed were in pain now. His little fists were scrunched-up, grabbing the sheets like they were the only thing that would save him. His feet were kicking against the glass in the bed, and-  
I couldn't look.  
But he looked at me, and I knew I had to look straight back. My marrows shook. God, I had to look. I knew… I knew… that this right here, right in my home, right in his bedroom, right now, right in the middle of autumn, was going to be the hardest thing I'd ever had to do.  
I was going to teach him how to die.  
I was going to teach him the one thing I didn't know.  
And I stepped in that room- Papyrus stepped in a few moments later- and closed the door.  
"Ground control to Major Tom…"  
The same song played in the background a room or two away. I put it on replay whenever I was stressed, and I wondered for a moment if Papyrus had adapted to and adopted that same behavior.  
Then came the pain.  
Pain is a throbbing thing, I would come to know in those hours to pass. Pain is more than a feeling. It's sentient. A beast. Encroaching. It's something that can be learned, something that can be taught. It's a vessel. It's a worm, tearing its way just below what the world can see. It's a companion, this rotting worm of ours.  
The pain came, and it came sudden, came swift, and the throbbing, sentient… thing, this creature, came back, and it wracked him. It wracked him, and the bones were whipped, and whipped, and torn, and whipped again.  
Hours and hours. Hours that almost led me to vomit over the toilet with stress. But I stayed there. I stayed in that room with my son, I stayed in that room for my son. I stayed there, gripped his hand, and when he squeezed mine until it ached, I squeezed his until I thought it was harder. We almost didn't say any words for those hours, yet he seemed to say the most to me then than I could any other time. I stayed there, and I watched, and what I would give to have switched places.  
"D-D-DDRG-DAD-"  
"Yes?"  
Of course. Of course. He needed medicine. Why was I so stupid? Medicine. I sputtered out the instructions to Papyrus, and to a mix of delight and terrifying awe, he'd already halfway figured out how to do it. The medicine came coursing, and the pain was still there, only pushed a few feet away.  
The heart monitor sang its song in the corner.  
"Did you use the-"  
Hands still clawing the bed. They never stopped.  
"-use the Deter-deter-detRGG-"  
Papyrus' eyes turned into pools, and before I could smile at him, tell him for a minute that it would be alright, Sans beat me. My own children, already three jumps each ahead of me.  
But while the smile seemed to make Papyrus chuckle a bit, but I only nodded. No speech. Nothing but the heart monitor yelling in its unpredictable way.  
The sound came from me, but a little quiet, then quieter before it ever got louder.  
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, dear God, I'm sorry-"  
It came again. The beast came again, came screeching.  
Before I could do anything, Sans' hand landed on my lap, and the heart monitor shouted awhile before going back to its normal whine. The left hand clawed deep, and the sheets were mauled, and his fingers found foam-  
"Dad."  
He lifted his head a little, laid it back down.  
"I wanted you to."  
It was enough to keep me silent for the next hour. It was an hour, surely, but it may as well have been a day. A year. A lifetime.  
But this hour let him say a few words. "Dad?"  
I lay my hand on his chest. "Yes?"  
"I'm sorry. Sorry for everything."  
"All's forgiven. All's forgiven."  
"I need you to do something, alright? 'Cuz it looks like I just might not be able to."  
I tried to predict what thing I'd have to do, who I'd have to forgive and lose this time, but my rationalizing turned into tumbling, stumbling, and my thoughts fell.  
The monitors protested. I found found he couldn't muster an "alright".  
"Dad." He looked at Papyrus, and then at a place only he could see, and then back at me. "Tell Azzie that I'm back, alright? Just this one thing. Just this one thing for me, alright?"  
Papyrus' mouth stuttered open, but one glare made it silent again.  
But maybe… just maybe, if the beast could be held back for a minute or two…  
"Yes, son. I promise I will. Soon as he gets back from the arena."  
He nodded, although something glinted and quickly faded away behind his eyes.  
Before any more words were said, I lifted him up. Strangely, the beast was gone now.  
"Dad. Dad. I'm so scared, Dad."  
"I know. I know."  
The monitors beeped to the point of exhaustion, and the world became nothing. Nothing except for the outside, when the moon set and it became night. A part of me, a small part of him, unrestrained, wanted my son's rest to come later, but my mind wanted it to come sooner. And what I would have given for it to come sooner.  
I would have given my soul.  
I would have given my bones.  
By the time it was over, by the time the reaper had poised himself over our house, the sky turned black, the others went in the door, Undyne still outside. I heard a whisper from Toriel to Chara to "say goodbye", and I shut my eyes and winced for the first time.  
Watching the light drain from his eyes is something I can't put down on paper. Watching those last breaths is something I can't put down on paper. To experience it, yes, I could put it down. But to watch it… I can't put it down on paper. Not fully, not scientifically, not in its full, accurate, tangle. I'm not sure if anyone can write like that in this tangle. But there is something I can put down.  
"Dad?"  
"Yes, son?"  
"Where's Jessica?"  
The heart monitor started to beep almost once every half a second. And I embraced him, took him into my arms, needing him as much as he needed me. I rocked him back and forth, slightly, ever so slightly. I could feel Papyrus' hands next to mine, and or the first time, we were all together, all at once.  
I bit my lip. I couldn't say anything. The pain had dwarfed me too much.  
"She's dead, isn't she? She got crushed by one of the rocks. I saw her. She's with Alina now."  
I couldn't say anything to respond to him then, and I can't say anything to respond to him now. All I could do was wait and watch and ponder, and that is all I can do now. Everything inside of me froze then, and how much more freezes inside me now. Even the thought of it, the thought of it makes me shiver…  
"Hey, bro… d'you still have the scarf?"  
It was just above a whisper now.  
Papyrus snatched it off his neck, and it was only when it touched his brother's hand that he started to cry.  
He looked into his brother's eyes until they turned into marbles, glazed with water. He smiled, the way he always had. I could hear his breath rattle a little, catching in his throat, not quite an exhale.  
And he died shaking.


	37. Chapter 37

The cloud came again, swooped over us in a buzzard's call. I stayed on that bed for longer than even Papyrus could tell. Papyrus stayed there, too, stayed in that chair, stayed staring for what seemed to be the longest time, for the rest of his life. And or the rest of his life there would undoubtedly be a part of him that would stay there. That's how it would always be for him.  
Me?  
I moved on that bed, almost curled under the sheets, tucked in my knees. I left the song in the background and let it play over and over again. I let the scent of the flowers go into my nose.  
I held the jacket to my chest, let my fingertips run through the dust over and over like it was nothing but sand on the beach.  
I let my feet run over the indentations where the beast had forced him to claw out the sheets.  
What I would have given to stay there. What I would have given to leave.  
An hour passed by. Two hours, and we were still in that room. Papyrus had been the one to disconnect the heart monitor, and the room hung still again. This was the same room we had walked through Grief with, the same room we would have to walk through it again. We didn't howl, we didn't scream or shout the way we did before. We only stood, and we paid tribute, and our hearts sunk down, down, down. Yet our faces didn't sink.  
Three hours, and Toriel came in, and Papyru stirred himself to movement again, at least to the upstairs. Toriel gave him everything that a mother could have and should have gave him, guided him to the shower upstairs, told him over and over again the constant half-truth of how everything would be alright, gave him a steaming mug of chamomile tea.  
We had seemed to be the direct opposite from how we reacted when he died the first time. When he died the first time. I still get chills each time I think that I can get away with that statement. We weren't screaming, weren't crying. We weren't ranting or raving or swearing or blaming anyone. We were silent. We were almost nothing.  
I remember that three hours after we first buried him, Papyrus and I sat in the dining room and said nothing. We didn't eat anything. We didn't drink. We didn't play games or laugh or look for college scholarships, or work. We didn't know what we were, but that seemed to be alright now. We were a family now.  
We were a family.  
And even as Asriel came in the door, eyes green and bright, none of us said a word.

"I am a worm and not a man, a reproach of man and despised by the people.  
I am poured out like water, and all my bones are wracked. My heart like wax, melted within me.  
My strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue cleaves to my jaws. You have laid me in the dust of death.  
I can number all my bones."

-From a book that I discovered not long after my son went there again


	38. Chapter 38

It's been a year since that silent night.  
Shortly after that, the silence allowed me to conduct a research plan that eventually directed me towards the "spotlights" that Mettaton used, all invented by Miss Alphys herself. And Miss Alphys would be absolutely thrilled at the fact that her invention helped to stop all of this. Using Miss Alphys' spotlights as a prototype, I enlisted Papyrus, and he gladly helped me design an amplified version of them in the quickest amount of time possible. After about two weeks of combining some of the initial compounds Alphys had used, they were ready. And they would have been ready if it weren't for Chara, understandably furious that he wasn't allowed to use them yet, toying with it and receiving temporary blindness even with the warnings and precautions I'd inscribed on the side. After the dark circle in the center of his vision dissipated- which took about an hour- I realized what he'd done was only a portion of its full brightness. I promised Chara that I would be the one to use it, that my vision was indispensable compared to his. After a few hours of discussion, Chara still vehemently insisted that he wanted, no, he needed to use it. And I smiled. I knew I would do the exact same thing had I been in his situation.  
The first thing I did was take Jessica's headphones and my computer- not Jessica's computer- and access Jessica's webpage to where anything I said into the computer's microphone could be transmitted to the rest of the speakers in the city's PA system. After instructing everyone to evacuate the premises around the arena, Undyne and I accompanied Chara not only to assist him in carrying his machine, but also to lure Betty there. However, we left the premises shortly before Chara took his position by the machine. Needless to say, Betty wouldn't resist the chance for a rematch against her three biggest aggressors, and when she ambled her way over, Chara activated the machine. Nothing was left of Betty but ashes, and I would have seen it for myself if the floaters still lingering in my own eyes from the machine's blast hadn't blocked the tears of joy from coming down.  
But there were no celebrations. While Undyne and I managed to recover from our temporary vision loss within a few hours, there was not even a sense of recovery from Chara. From now on, he would have to come with me to undergo a rigorous rehabilitation process with me for at least an hour each day. I managed to teach him Braille, but it was him who managed to come up with most of his adaptations to survive everyday life. A part of me felt horrible that he was blind, that he wasn't able to see what was coming in those next few months.  
We began to change. For the first time in what seemed like eternity, we weren't nothing anymore. We started to adopt real family dynamics. Toriel and Asgore, ever since Asriel broke out of his shell of HATE, started to adopt more matrimonial patterns. For the first time, their children seemed relaxed, and even Chara seemed so, which was extremely hard since he contracted his blindness. For the first time, it seemed that Chara could confide in the family structure they'd had before everything fell apart, since before Chara and Asriel both died for the first time. While I'm not completely a stickler to tradition, there was something unmistakable in the relief that crossed Chara's face when Asgore took Toriel out to the backyard… it was finally safe to do so… for a dance. (Of course, I'd taught Asgore his signature tango swoop.) Professionally, however, Toriel and Asgore became figureheads when it came to their royalty, serving in what would be considered layman's' jobs compared to their former royal status. While Toriel remained in her academy, Asgore became the head of the Human Security Organization, and, while the Anti-Monster Department has not become completely dismantled, he is on the verge of doing so. I'm glad to help him, but some nights he pushes me away despite knowing that I can handle a certain subject, such as the effects of anti-monster weapons on the chemistry of the monster body, better than he can. But we're still emphatically grateful for Asgore's work.  
Asriel, to his family's surprise, has graduated elementary school ahead of time, while Chara was still in the fourth grade. So far, he has done exemplary work when it comes to art, and he has in fact been selected for the middle school's gifted art program despite only being ten years old. In addition, he has joined the school choir and registered to three volunteering organizations, bringing an almost devout sort of membership to them, and is now bent on starting his own novel to chronicle his own fantasy story. But there is still undoubtedly something wrong. Sometimes, when his many friends would come over to play with him and Chara (but mostly to enjoy Asriel's company and disposition), an innocuous comment about a javelin or even a track meet would cause Asriel to excuse himself to the bathroom before the inevitable vomiting noise sent Toriel and I rushing upstairs. And one day, I saw Asgore worriedly searching on the Internet searching for causes to perfectionism in children, although I knew deep down both him and I knew the answer.  
After a recent bout of harassment in the police force due to Asgore's new leadership in the Human Security Organization, Undyne sought out new employment in the Army, which she claimed was "gonna happen anyway." She has petitioned to put in her own Monster Squadron due to the overwhelming number of monsters who have already served in the siege craving for some sort of normality by joining the Army. She would often bring a new friend home from the recruitment station, with Undyne grumbling the next morning about how "she wasn't ready" and how her friend wouldn't be back. And when she finally did go to the Army, it was a tearful goodbye from back home, but something told me- no, yelled at me- that she would be happier in some other corner of the globe. Still, she's sent us letters once a week, although for her, words never really showed how happy she was.  
But us?  
We became much less silent, and in fact developed an unspoken code that dictated that no secrets were permitted across us. Soon, as we began to clean the things out of Sans' room, we started to share everything that we had held back from each other during the siege. With every morning cup of coffee that I had, Papyrus went out of his way to prepare breakfast, and during those almost-sacred meals, we would pour out every thought that had been running through our heads that wasn't too terrifying to put into any sort of conversation. As I helped him get back in the groove with his middle school schedule, he agreed to assist me in some of his experiments. During the times to where Grief would give us a wallop out of nowhere, we would whisper half-truths to each other about how everything would be alright and give complete truths about how we would be there for each other. And we poured not just the Grief, but everything else inside us into other areas of our lives. Papyrus poured his into his studies, during which he received a scholarship paying for his entire first year of college. In addition, he poured his into his food, and has been assigned, to his great delight, as the family chef. Like Asriel, he has no shortage of friends, and it is this accomplishment that makes me smile the most. As for me? While science is still something close to a viable obsession for me, I developed a love for music that began when Undyne taught me a few simple, rudimentary piano chords. Eventually, I moved to vocals after being told once, exactly once, that my voice had some sort of potential. Personally, I hated its sound, but as much as I hated it, Papyrus goaded me to keep going. And so, while I hated the sound streaming out of my throat, I learned to love the act of singing. With this and what has happened into this book feeding into song lyrics, I produced an album, which is an awkward, uncomfortable secret that I very often prefer to hide from those who even slightly know me. But I loved the act of producing something, of creating something that gradually, I learned other people loved. And if I could do that- if I could keep myself in the realm of sanity while feeding both of the sides of me at once- then it was enough. God, it was enough.  
International assistance, for the first time, poured in. And it wasn't only from the Human Security Organization. For those few months, they hounded me, and the story that you have read and the story that I have shared with the world poured out of my mouth, with eyewitness accounts from others filling in the bits I forgot. My story has now reached across the world, hopefully starting a better world, or at least a little understanding, for monsterkind. And if that isn't enough for me, I don't know what is.  
And it was in those months that Papyrus came up to me.  
He poured a hot cup of coffee for me,  
black with two creams like he'd memorized from the very first time he was allowed to use the coffee machine,  
and the conversation afterwards looked something  
like  
this:  
"Hey, Dad?"  
"Yes, son?"  
"You ever think of writing a book?"


End file.
